SAM COOKE (1931-1964) Artist Biography by Bruce Eder
Sam Cooke
was the most important soul singer in history -- he was also the
inventor of soul music, and its most popular and beloved performer in
both the black and white communities. Equally important, he was among
the first modern black performers and composers to attend to the
business side of the music business, and founded both a record label and
a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and
composer. Yet, those business interests didn't prevent him from being
engaged in topical issues, including the struggle over civil rights, the
pitch and intensity of which followed an arc that paralleled Cooke's
emergence as a star -- his own career bridged gaps between black and
white audiences that few had tried to surmount, much less succeeded at
doing, and also between generations; where Chuck Berry or Little Richard brought black and white teenagers together, James Brown sold records to white teenagers and black listeners of all ages, and Muddy Waters got young white folkies and older black transplants from the South onto the same page, Cooke
appealed to all of the above, and the parents of those white teenagers
as well -- yet he never lost his credibility with his core black
audience. In a sense, his appeal anticipated that of the Beatles, in breadth and depth.
He was born Sam Cook
in Clarksdale, MS, on January 22, 1931, one of eight children of a
Baptist minister and his wife. Even as a young boy, he showed an
extraordinary voice and frequently sang in the choir in his father's
church. During the middle of the decade, the Cook family moved to
Chicago's South Side, where the Reverend Charles Cook quickly
established himself as a major figure in the religious community. Sam
and three of his siblings also formed a group of their own, the Singing
Children, in the 1930s. Although his own singing was confined to gospel
music, he was aware and appreciative of the popular music of the
period, particularly the melodious, harmony-based sounds of the Ink Spots,
whose influence could later be heard in songs such as "You Send Me" and
"For Sentimental Reasons." As a teenager, he was a member of the Teen
Highway QCs, a gospel group that performed in churches and at religious
gatherings. His membership in that group led to his introduction to the Soul Stirrers, one of the top gospel groups in the country, and in 1950 he joined them.
If Cooke had never recorded a note of music on his own, he would still be remembered today in gospel circles for his work with the Soul Stirrers.
Over the next six years, his role within the group and his prominence
within the black community rose to the point where he was already a
star, with his own fiercely admiring and devoted audience, through his
performances on songs like "Touch the Hem of His Garment," "Nearer to
Thee," and "That's Heaven to Me." The group was one of the top acts on Art Rupe's Specialty Records label, and he might have gone on for years as their most popular singer, but Cooke's
goal was to reach audiences beyond the religious community, and beyond
the black population, with his voice. This was a tall order at the time,
as the mere act of recording a popular song could alienate the gospel
listenership in an instant; singing for God was regarded in those
circles as a gift and a responsibility, and popular music, rock &
roll, and R&B were to be abhorred, at least coming from the mouth of
a gospel singer; the gap was so great that when a blues singer such as Blind Gary Davis became "sanctified" (that is, found religion) as the Rev. Gary Davis,
he could still sing and play his old blues melodies, but had to devise
new words, and he never sang the blues words again.
He tested the waters of popular music in 1956 with the single "Lovable," produced by Bumps Blackwell and credited under the name Dale Cooke so as not to attract too much attention from his existing audience. It was enough, however, to get Cooke dropped by the Soul Stirrers
and their record label, but that freed him to record under his real
name. The result was one of the biggest selling singles of the 1950s, a Cooke
original entitled "You Send Me," which sold over two million copies on
the tiny Keen Records label and hit number one on both the pop and
R&B charts. Although it seems like a tame record today, "You Send
Me" was a pioneering soul record in its time, melding elements of
R&B, gospel, and pop into a sound that was new and still coalescing
at the time.
Cooke
was with Keen for the next two years, a period in which he delivered up
some of the prettiest romantic ballads and teen pop singles of the era,
including "For Sentimental Reasons," "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha,"
"Only Sixteen," and "(What A) Wonderful World." These were
extraordinarily beautiful records, and in between the singles came some
early album efforts, most notably Tribute to the Lady, his album of songs associated with Billie Holiday.
He was unhappy, however, with both the business arrangement that he had
with Keen and the limitations inherent with recording for a small label
-- equally to the point, major labels were knocking on Cooke's
door, including Atlantic and RCA Records; Atlantic, which was not yet
the international conglomerate that it later became, was the top
R&B-oriented label in the country and Cooke almost certainly would have signed there and found a happy home with the company, except that they wanted his publishing, and Cooke
had seen the sales figures on his songs, as well as their popularity in
cover versions by other artists, and was well aware of the importance
of owning his copyrights.
Thus, he signed with RCA Records, then one of the
three biggest labels in the world (the others being Columbia and Decca),
even as he organized his own publishing company, Kags Music, and a
record label, SAR, through which he would produce other artists' records
-- among those signed to SAR were the Soul Stirrers, Bobby Womack (late of the Valentinos, who were also signed to the label), former Soul Stirrers member Johnny Taylor, Billy Preston, Johnnie Morisette, and the Simms Twins.
Cooke's
RCA sides were a strangely schizophrenic body of work, at least for the
first two years. He broke new ground in pop and soul with the single
"Chain Gang," a strange mix of sweet melodies and gritty, sweaty
sensibilities that also introduced something of a social conscience to
his work -- a number two hit on both the pop and R&B charts, it was
his biggest hit since "You Send Me" and heralded a bolder phase in his
career. Singles like bluesy, romantic "Sad Mood," the idyllic romantic
soul of "Cupid," and the straight-ahead dance tune "Twistin' the Night
Away" (a pop Top Ten and a number one R&B hit), and "Bring It on
Home to Me" all lived up to this promise, and also sold in huge numbers.
But the first two albums that RCA had him do, Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour,
were among the lamest LPs ever recorded by any soul or R&B singer,
comprised of washed-out pop tunes in arrangements that showed almost
none of Cooke's gifts to their advantage.
In 1962, Cooke issued Twistin' the Night Away,
a somewhat belated "twist" album that became one of his biggest-selling
LPs. He didn't really hit his stride as an LP artist, however, until
1963 with the release of Night Beat,
a beautifully self-contained, dark, moody assembly of blues-oriented
songs that were among the best and most challenging numbers that Cooke
had recorded up to that time. By the time of its release, he was mostly
identified through his singles, which were among the best work of their
era, and had developed two separate audiences, among white teen and
post-teen listeners and black audiences of all ages. It was Cooke's
hope to cross over to the white audience more thoroughly, and open up
doors for black performers that, up to that time, had mostly been closed
-- he had tried playing the Copa in New York as early as 1957 and
failed at the time, mostly owing to his inexperience, but in 1964 he
returned to the club in triumph, an event that also yielded one of the
most finely recorded live performances of its period. The problem with
the Copa performance was that it didn't really represent what Sam Cooke was about in full -- it was Cooke
at his most genial and non-confrontational, doing his safest repertory
for a largely middle-aged, middle-class white audience; they responded
enthusiastically, to be sure, but only to Cooke's tamest persona.
In mid-1963, however, Cooke
had done a show at the Harlem Square Club in Miami that had been
recorded. Working in front of a black audience and doing his "real"
show, he delivered a sweaty, spellbinding performance built on the same
elements found in his singles and his best album tracks, combining
achingly beautiful melodies and gritty soul sensibilities. The two live
albums sum up the split in Cooke's
career and the sheer range of his talent, the rewards of which he'd
finally begun to realize more fully in 1963 and 1964.
The drowning death of his infant son in mid-1963 had made it impossible for Cooke
to work in the studio until the end of that year. During that time,
however, with Allen Klein now managing his business affairs, Cooke
did achieve the financial and creative independence that he'd wanted,
including more money than any black performer had ever been advanced
before, and the eventual ownership of his recordings beginning in
November of 1963 -- he had achieved creative control of his recordings
as well, and seemed poised for a breakthrough. It came when he resumed
making records, amid the musical ferment of the early '60s. Cooke was keenly aware of the music around him, and was particularly entranced by Bob Dylan's
song "Blowin' in the Wind," its treatment of the plight of black
Americans and other politically oppressed minorities, and its success in
the hands of Peter, Paul & Mary
-- all of these factors convinced him that the time was right for songs
that dealt with more than twisting the night away.
The result was "A Change Is Gonna Come," perhaps the
greatest song to come out of the civil rights struggle, and one that
seemed to close and seal the gap between the two directions of Cooke's career, from gospel to pop. Arguably his greatest and his most important song, it was an artistic apotheosis for Cooke.
During this same period, he had also devised a newer, more advanced
dance-oriented soul sound in the form of the song "Shake." These two
recordings heralded a new era for Cooke and a new phase of his career, with seemingly the whole world open to him.
None of it was to be. Early in the day on December 11, 1964, while in Los Angeles, Cooke
became involved in an altercation at a seedy motel, with a woman guest
and the night manager, and was shot to death while allegedly trying to
attack the manager. The case is still shrouded in doubt and mystery, and
was never investigated the way the murder of a star of his stature
would be today. Cooke's
death shocked the black community and reverberated far beyond -- his
single "Shake" was a posthumous Top Ten hit, as were "A Change Is Gonna
Come" and the At the Copa album, released in 1965. Otis Redding, Al Green, and Solomon Burke, among others, picked up key parts of Cooke's repertory, as did white performers, including the Animals and the Rolling Stones. Even the Supremes
recorded a memorial album of his songs, which is now one of the most
sought-after of their original recordings, in either LP or CD form.
His reputation survived, at least among those who were smart enough to look behind the songs -- to hear Redding's performance of "Shake" at the Monterey Pop Festival, for example, and see where it came from. Cooke's own records were a little tougher to appreciate, however. Listeners who heard those first two, rather poor RCA albums, Hits of the Fifties and Cooke's Tour,
could only wonder what the big deal was about, and several of the
albums that followed were uneven enough to give potential fans pause.
Meanwhile, the contractual situation surrounding Cooke's recordings greatly complicated the reissue of his work -- Cooke's
business manager, Allen Klein, exerted a good deal of control,
especially over the songs cut during that last year of the singer's
life. By the 1970s, there were some fairly poor, mostly budget-priced
compilations available, consisting of the hits up through early 1963,
and for a time there was even a television compilation out there, but
that was it. The movie National Lampoon's Animal House made use of a
pair of Cooke
songs, "(What A) Wonderful World" and "Twistin' the Night Away," which
greatly raised his profile among college students and younger
baby-boomers, and Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes made almost a mini-career out of reviving Cooke's songs (most notably "Having a Party," and even part of "A Change Is Gonna Come") in concert. In 1986, The Man and His Music went some way to correcting the absence of all but the early hits in a career-spanning compilation, but since the mid-'90s, Cooke's
final year's worth of releases have been separated from the earlier RCA
and Keen material, and is in the hands of Klein's ABKCO label. Finally,
in the late '90s and beyond, RCA, ABKCO, and even Specialty (which
still owns Cooke's gospel sides with the Soul Stirrers) each issued comprehensive collections of their portions of Cooke's catalog.
Sam Cooke (born January 22, 1931, died December 11, 1964
SAM COOKE
Considered by many to be the definitive soul singer, Sam Cooke blended sensuality and spirituality, sophistication and soul, movie-idol looks and gospel-singer poise. His warm, confessional voice won him a devoted gospel following as lead singer for the Soul Stirrers and sent “You Send Me,” one of his earliest secular recordings, to the top of the pop and R&B charts in 1957. It was the first of 29 Top Forty hits for the Chicago-raised singer, who was one of eight sons born to a Baptist minister.
Cooke’s career was defined by his early embrace of gospel and his subsequent move into the world of pop music and rhythm & blues. Joining the Soul Stirrers at age fifteen, he served as lead vocalist from 1950-56. He recorded his first pop song, “Lovable,” as Dale Cook, choosing the pseudonym so as not to jeopardize his standing within the gospel community. Nonetheless, he’d crossed a line that made it impossible for him to carry on with the Soul Stirrers. Cooke’s first solo successes came on the Keen label, for which he recorded “You Send Me,” “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” and “Wonderful World,” among others. In 1960 Cooke signed with RCA, where his hits included “Chain Gang,” “Cupid,” “Another Saturday Night” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” A versatile singer who never really settled on a style, Cooke tackled everything from sophisticated balladry and lighthearted pop to finger-popping rock and roll and raw, raspy rhythm & blues.
In addition to being a performer, Cooke established himself as a successful and even groundbreaking black entrepreneur operating within the mainstream music industry. Cooke produced records for other singers, founded his own publishing company (Kags Music) and launched a record label (Sar/Derby). He also helped such fellow artists as Bobby Womack, Johnnie Taylor, Billy Preston and Lou Rawls make the transition from gospel to pop. Tragically, Cooke was shot to death at a Los Angeles motel on December 11th, 1964, under mysterious circumstances. RCA posthumously issued “Shake” b/w “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Regarded as one of the greatest singles of the modern era, it matched a hard-hitting R&B number (later cut by Otis Redding) with a haunting song about faith and reckoning that returned Cooke’s voice to its familiar gospel home.
Sam Cooke (vocals; born January 22, 1931, died December 11, 1964)
Considered by many to be the definitive soul singer, Sam Cooke
blended sensuality and spirituality, sophistication and soul, movie-idol
looks and gospel-singer poise. His warm, confessional voice won him a
devoted gospel following as lead singer for the Soul Stirrers and
sent “You Send Me,” one of his earliest secular recordings, to the top
of the pop and R&B charts in 1957. It was the first of 29 Top Forty
hits for the Chicago-raised singer, who was one of eight sons born to a
Baptist minister.
Cooke’s career was defined by his early embrace of gospel and his
subsequent move into the world of pop music and rhythm & blues.
Joining the Soul Stirrers at
age fifteen, he served as lead vocalist from 1950-56. He recorded his
first pop song, “Lovable,” as Dale Cook, choosing the pseudonym so as
not to jeopardize his standing within the gospel community. Nonetheless,
he’d crossed a line that made it impossible for him to carry on with the Soul Stirrers.
Cooke’s first solo successes came on the Keen label, for which he
recorded “You Send Me,” “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” and
“Wonderful World,” among others. In 1960 Cooke signed with RCA, where
his hits included “Chain Gang,” “Cupid,” “Another Saturday Night” and
“Twistin’ the Night Away.” A versatile singer who never really settled
on a style, Cooke tackled everything from sophisticated balladry and
lighthearted pop to finger-popping rock and roll and raw, raspy rhythm
& blues.
In addition to being a performer, Cooke established himself as a
successful and even groundbreaking black entrepreneur operating within
the mainstream music industry. Cooke produced records for other singers,
founded his own publishing company (Kags Music) and launched a record
label (Sar/Derby). He also helped such fellow artists as Bobby Womack,
Johnnie Taylor, Billy Preston and Lou Rawls make the transition from
gospel to pop. Tragically, Cooke was shot to death at a Los Angeles
motel on December 11th, 1964, under mysterious circumstances. RCA
posthumously issued “Shake” b/w “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Regarded as
one of the greatest singles of the modern era, it matched a hard-hitting
R&B number (later cut by Otis Redding) with a haunting song about faith and reckoning that returned Cooke’s voice to its familiar gospel home.
- See more at: https://rockhall.com/inductees/sam-cooke/bio/#sthash.3wIFPKvp.dpuf
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal CONAN in Washington. Our focus today, our main guest is Peter Guralnick, author of the new book Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke. We're having some difficulty technically getting him setup in the studio in Boston. He'll be joining us shortly.
Earlier today, as you may know, the Al-Jazeera television network broadcast excerpts from an audio tape purported to be from Osama Bin Laden, and in fact, you can hear more on that story later today on NPR News. This coming Sunday, though, would have been Sam Cooke's 75th birthday.
CONAN: That magical voice animated a long string of hits that came to a sudden end when Sam Cooke was shot and killed in a motel manager's office in 1964 at the age of 33. In a new biography, writer Peter Guralnick traces Sam Cooke's career.
He began singing with his brothers and sisters in his father's church in Chicago, became a star on the gospel circuit and then broke through. Along with Ray Charles, Cooke was among the first to crossover from gospel to pop. Like other black stars, he struggled with white-owned record companies, but Sam Cooke went ahead and formed his own record label. Like the rest of his generation, he got caught up in the civil rights movement.
Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke sets the singer and songwriter in the context of his times, of his ambitions, of his enormous accomplishment and describes his darker side as well. Later in the program, the Vatican newspaper weighs in on intelligent design, but first, if you have question about the life and times of Sam Cooke, give us a call or send us an email. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. That's 800-989-TALK. The email address is talk@npr.org. Peter Guralnick joins us now from the studios of WBUR, our member station in Boston, Massachusetts. Nice to have you on the program, Peter.
Mr. PETER GURALNICK (Author, Dream Boogie): Well, it's good to be here.
CONAN: This may sound like a strange question, but everybody knows You Send Me and Chain Gang and Wonderful World and A Change Is Gonna Come and more, but do people really remember Sam Cooke?
MR. GURALNICK: Well, I think that's just one of the anomalies of creativity in any field is that if the work has any worth, it will survive, but often the creator may be lost sight of for periods of time. I mean, somebody like John Donne disappeared for 300 years. Robert Johnson disappeared for 50. I think in the case of Sam Cooke, I think that his, you know, his celebrity or his fame was definitely cut down by the fact that he died so young, but his songs have never gone away.
CONAN: He died, also, at a time when it seems he was nationally known, internationally known, but on the cusp of even greater renown.
MR. GURALNICK: Well, he was really on the cusp of so many things. I mean, one thing about Sam Cooke is that he was always moving forward. There was never a period of life, there was never a period in his life from the time he was five years old where he didn't have a sense of strong forward motion. And at the end of his life, he envisioned any number of new advances.
For one thing, he was making a more and more explicit commitment to the civil rights movement, had set up a benefit performance for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had had his song A Change Is Gonna Come adopted as a kind of anthem for the movement. But in addition to that, he was planning to plan supper clubs, to open in Las Vegas, he had just signed a movie contract, and on the last night of his life, he spoke of going into the studio in the next month and recording a gut bucket blues album which would be influenced by his great love for the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker.
So I mean, we tend to compartmentalize things, and we often say, oh, somebody goes in this direction, they can't possibly go in that direction. I mean, they might sell out by doing this...
CONAN: Mm hmm.
MR. GURALNICK: ...if we don't like it or, but in Sam's case, he truly believed, he had been brought up by his father to believe never allow anyone else to set any limits for you, never put any limits on yourself, and he genuinely didn't. He really believed he could do it all.
CONAN: Hm. Sam Cooke's father, a minister, an itinerant minister much of his life, but for most of his childhood there in Chicago. But he started him singing with his brothers and sisters in a little group that they took around to various places, and then he joined other local groups and became an absolute star, and I don't think people understand this, on the gospel circuit when he was the lead singer with a group called the Soul Stirrers.
MR. GURALNICK: Well, that's right. I mean, he was in essence kind of matinee idol on the gospel circuit. I mean, there were other great stars there. There were, Archie Brownlee with the Five Blind Boys was a great, great singer and a star in his own right, and there was someone like June Cheeks with the Sensational Nightingales. But Sam, as Bobby Womack who was a protégée of his, who met Sam when he was only seven or eight years old, Bobby Womack always likes to say Sam brought sex into the church, and while that may not be explicitly true, or it may be, I'm not sure, but, you know, he attracted an audience, and he had a kind of seductive style that was new to quartet singing. Most of the singers that he was going up against, like Archie Brownlee, like June Cheeks, like, oh, Kylo Turner and Keith Barber with the Pilgrim Travelers who traveled all over with the Soul Stirrers...
CONAN: Mm hmm.
MR. GURALNICK: ...they were more shouters. They were, in some cases they were screamers, but they really put their music out there by the volume that they created and the passion that they communicated. And it's not that what Sam was doing was better or worse. But what he was doing, he was a crooner in that field, and he brought teenagers into the church. He brought young girls, and he brought an atmosphere, a kind of seductiveness into the music which was a natural to crossover into pop music.
CONAN: Let's hear a little clip of, this is Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers and one of their biggest hits, Jesus Gave Me Water.
(Soundbite Sam Cooke and Soul Stirrers singing Jesus Gave Me Water)
CONAN: And interestingly that we listen to that, Peter Guralnick, we can hear Sam Cooke's voice. It sounds a little light, a little young. We don't hear that characteristic sound that he had in so many of his pop and R&B records, that whoo. I'm not gonna try to do it, that whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo.
MR. GURALNICK: I think you should do it.
CONAN: Another career maybe.
MR. GURALNICK: But, no, I mean, he, that was something that he developed. I mean, he came close to it. He came up in the wake of another great lead singer R.H. Harris, who really set the tone for all of the quartets singing in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and Harris had what he called a yodel, and it was really almost a natural break into a falsetto that really was almost as natural as his regular voice.
CONAN: Hm.
MR. GURALNICK: And it was that break between the, between his, you know, what you would call his natural range into the falsetto that created the yodel. Well, Sam couldn't really do that, and eventually he created, I'm gonna leave it to you to do the whoo-whoo-whoo...
CONAN: OK.
MR. GURALNICK: But, you know, he created that almost as compensation. But I, although people say that, I'm really not convinced of it. I think that he was developing his own style, and in fact, it should be pointed out that that Jesus Gave Me Water was the very first record that came out with him as lead singer with the Soul Stirrers. He was just 20 years old when he recorded it.
CONAN: Boy, he sounds so confident there.
MR. GURALNICK: He does. And the point is this was a song, the owner of the label, Art Rupe, the Specialty Records owner, was adamantly opposed to the Soul Stirrers recording this with this kid. He didn't want the kid to record at all, but he definitely didn't want to record that song because it had just been a hit for the Pilgrim Travelers on Specialty, and every single gospel group had...
CONAN: Which was Art Rupe's label, yeah.
MR. GURALNICK: ...which was Art Rupe's label, exactly. And every gospel group, it seemed, had recorded Jesus Gave Me Water. Well, Sam had been singing it with his teenage gospel group that he had been with just before the Soul Stirrers, the Highway QC's, and it was so much a signature to him that the manager for The Soulsters, F.R. Crain(ph), and the Pilgrims travel manager, J.W. Alexander, who was a great champion of insisted, give him a chance. And you can hear the resolve out there. And although you're right, his voice is like, you can hear it break in places. But, nonetheless, there's so much confidence and again, even without that characteristic yodel, there is still such a remarkable sense of the style of his own.
CONAN: Peter GURALNICK's, new book is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. If you'd like to join the conversation, 800-989-8255 or send us e-mail: talk@npr.org.
Let's take some callers.
This is Tony(ph). Tony's calling from Portland, Indiana.
TONY (Caller): Hello, yes I love the show.
CONAN: Thank you.
TONY: And the subject's great because his music stirs my soul. What was his relationship with Lou Rawls?
MR. GURALNICK: Well, Lou Rawls was kind of the protégé of Sam's. I mean, Lou Rawls grew up in Chicago and as Lou Rawls said, you just wanted to hang around with Sam. You know because you knew that there was so much happening there was always going to be some fall out for you.
And Lou Rawls came up in gospel groups like the Holy Wonders and the Teenage Kings of Harmony and their Queen, which were secondary to the gospel group that Sam was signing in as a teenager, the Highway QCs.
And basically, Lou Rawls' whole career he, when he entered, what you want to call the Big Time in gospel it was as the lead signer of The Pilgrim Travelers after he got out of the Army. Which Sam's friend and business partner J.W. Alexander managed and brought Lou into the Pilgrim Travelers. J.W. Alexander became Lou's great guide and to some extent his manager, brought him to Capital Records. And Lou sang on many of Sam's records, sang backup. The most notable one being Bring it On Home to Me…
TONY: Oh, that's a great song.
MR. GURALNICK: …which Sam recorded in 1962 and which really marked the return, on Sam's part, to the kind of gospel sound.
TONY: And wasn't Sam Cooke one of the original members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
MR. GURALNICK: He was. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I think, in 1986, with Elvis Presley and Little Richard and Chuck Barry and James Brown. And you know, it was a great class.
TONY: Well, thank you for remembering him.
CONAN: Tony, thanks for the call. I just wanted to read and excerpt from Peter Guralnick's book. This is from L.C. Cooke, Sam's brother talking about his brother when he was very young. “‘I figured out my life then,' he said. ‘I'm never going to have a nine-to-five job.' I said, ‘what do you mean Sam?' He said, ‘Man, I figured out the whole system.' He said, ‘it's designed if you work to keep you working. All you do is live from payday to payday. At the end of the week, you're broke again.' He said, ‘the system is designed like that.' And I'm listening, I'm seven and he's nine and he's talking about the system. I said, ‘what are you going to do then if you ain't going to work, Sam?' He said, ‘I'm going to sing and I'm going to make me a lot of money.' And that's just what he did.” There's a man who knew what he was going to do with his life.
MR. GURALNICK: Well, exactly, and you know his brother L.C., while he is certainly a reflective person and somebody who has his own insights. To this day the system doesn't mean anything to L.C. I mean, when he speaks of Sam telling him that, he's referring to a child who became an adult with a deeply analytic cast of mind.
I mean, all his life Sam really sat himself to figure out how to do things work and how do I move ahead within the frame work of the way the things work.
CONAN: We're talking with Peter Guralnick whose new book is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.
If you'd like to join the conversation, 800-989-8255 or e-mail us: talk@npr.org.
We'll be back after a short break.
I'm Neal Conan you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
(Soundbite, music)
CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION, I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
We're talking about gospel pop and R&B legend Sam Cooke today. Our guest is Peter Guralnick, whose newest book is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. If you'd like to read an excerpt of the book and listen to some of Sam Cooke's music you can visit our Web site at NPR.org. And if you want to speak with Peter Guralnick, give us a call: 800-989-8255; e-mail address is talk@npr.org.
Let's get another caller on the line. This is David. David's with us from Kansas City.
DAVID (Caller): Hi.
MR. GURALNICK: Hi, David.
DAVID: I'm a huge Sam Cooke fan, but also kind of an amateur musician. And a year or so ago I tried to look for sheet music, piano/guitar music for Sam Cooke songs. And I found that almost none of it was available. The only thing you could buy commercially was a collection of his very, very early stuff, which was primarily the gospel music.
And it got me wondering of the later songs of Sam Cooke that most of us know Wonderful World, Change is Gonna Come, Bring it Back Home to Me. How many of those were actually written or, by Sam Cooke or Sam Cooke compositions. And to what extent was his music owned by other people and controlled by other people?
MR. GURALNICK: Every one was written by Sam Cooke and every one was…
David: That's what I thought.
MR. GURALNICK: …controlled by Sam Cooke because he started in 1959 with his friend J.W. Alexander. He started his own publishing company, Keg's Music, which was actually named for Lou Rawls stepfather Keg. His nickname was Keg because he was an armature bartender. But so Sam, again, in line with that quote from his brother L.C. at the age of nine, Sam saw the system for what it was and really with J.W. Alexander's tutorial because J.W. was 15 or 20 years older than Sam. He learned early on that that the music business is a business. And at the heart of the business, the heart of the business is ownership. That's where you make your money.
DAVID: I was just wondering if, there must be some reason that his estate or the people who later took control of his music have chosen not to issue. The records are out there for us, but you can't purchase, you can't purchase sheet music to it.
MR. GURALNICK: I don't know what the politics of sheet music are. I mean, I don't know what or the business of sheet music. I know that there's a booklet which is of all the songs from Sam Cooke's Sar record story, which is the label. Neal was talking about it earlier, the label that he and J.W. owned. And on which they recorded people like Johnny Taylor, the Simpson Twins, The Valentinos, The Soulsters. Most of those songs are also songs that he wrote. And there's a booklet with sheet music for each of the songs on that two-CD set.
But I know that when Portrait of a Legend came out a couple of years ago. The intent was to have a book, this is all of his greatest hits, it's on the ABKCO Label and the intention was to put out a book with that sheet music. But I never followed up on it and I, I'm sure you're right. I'm, you seemed to have pursued it and…
DAVID: He wrote all those songs, huh?
MR. GURALNICK: Yep, he wrote all the songs for all of his artists, virtually all of the songs for all of his artists on Sar Records.
DAVID: What a genius. He was the best.
CONAN: David, thanks for the call, good luck looking for the music.
DAVID: All right, thanks.
CONAN: You mentioned Sar Records. Art Rupe mentioned earlier that the guy that ran Specialty Records, he and Sam had a lot of professional problems. Sam thought he was being ripped off and ended up leaving Art Rupe feeling like he had been ripped off.
Sam formed his own company, Sar Records. But then he went to work for a big time label. He was recording for RCA.
MR. GURALNICK: Well yeah, actually, the company that he went to after when he left Specialty. And you're right, they both Art Rupe and Sam felt seriously abused. Each felt abused by the other in a business sense. But Sam went to a label that didn't have a name initially, but was, when it was formed over the summer of 1957 and when his and his record You Send Me was the first record on that Keen label. Which was owned by an airplane parts manufacturer named John Fiamis(ph).
While he was on Keen he started his own label, which was Sar Records in 1959 basically to record The Soulsters. But he himself was never on his own label.
He and J.W. recorded as J.W. said, J.W. was just a wonderful person and a great mentor to Sam and eventually much later in his life to me too, but he, J.W. said they recorded, we recorded people we liked.
But Sam went from Keen Records to RCA with the idea of, you know, not staying on his own label because he believed that you know what he wanted was major label exposure. He believed he could compete in the same market place as Elvis Presley. Saying he was the second biggest single seller on RCA behind Elvis Presley.
CONAN: One of his big hits for RCA, Chain Gang. Let's take a listen.
(Soundbite of Chain Gang)
CONAN: Sam Cooke and Chain Gang. As a song writer, Peter Guralnick, he liked to describe things that he saw. This is one of many occasions you describe in the book where he saw something happen and said, “That's a song” and proceeded to write it down.
MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. I know that's exactly I mean he carried a notebook with him everywhere he went and it just, like that Norman Mailer story and advertisements for myself, The Notebook. He just, everywhere he went he carried a notebook to jot his. And if he didn't have a notebook, he'd write it down on a napkin.
But he saw himself as a kind of reporter so that, as you say, I mean he saw this chain gang in the Carolinas. He and his brother Charles, I don't think he'd ever seen a chain gang before. He and Charles went and got cigarettes for the prisoners but he wrote the song that he wrote rather than being a social protest song, it was almost a romantic song about the women back home and when they get back home. And actually, if you were to listen to the session tapes and you see how the song evolves, it's fascinating how he takes a real life situation and he sees it as a kind of drama but he develops it almost like a fiction writer aligns with his imagination suggests.
And similarly I mean he saw these dancers at the Peppermint Lounge you know doing the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge. High Society doing the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge on TV and then wrote the song Twisting the Night Away in which he peoples with characters. I mean these are very brief, you know character sketches. But the idea is to create a scene and to create a kind of storyline and he believed deeply in simplicity so that it was a matter of presenting characters in a storyline that the listener could immediately grasp and a melody as he said that the person on the street, the person walking down the street could pick up on and could hum to himself or herself.
CONAN: Let's get another caller on the line, Jim. Jim's calling from Tuscan, Arizona.
JIM (Caller): Hi.
CONAN: Hi, you're on the air; go ahead please.
JIM: I wanted to ask your guest if he is familiar with any alcohol problems Sam Cooke had.
MR. GURALNICK: No I wouldn't say that he had any alcohol problem. He drank, his son Vincent drowned in…
JIM: I hired him in 1964, 65 for our fraternity in a university I was going to and he got off the plane in Oklahoma. He stood on the tarmac and he goes, “Here I am in Oklahoma City. Lot's of pigs, lots' of cattle, lot's of nothing. Oh, New York, New York where's my skyscraper?” as he turned around two or three times.
And then he couldn't even, by that night, that was the afternoon, and by the evening he, went on and he couldn't even do the second part of the act. He had to have the comedian and the band do a second round and people were upset and everything. And I was just…
MR. GURALNICK: Well, I, yeah I don't know. He met a very demanding schedule. He performed probably as much as you know 200, 250 nights a year. I‘ve never heard a story like that. I've never seen a show that he missed. I've never, you know, I've spoken to hundreds of people, and so I think that was very uncharacteristic of, but that certainly doesn't, he was certainly, after the death of his son Vincent in, I think May of 1963, he was depressed and he drank more.
But as far as meeting his professional responsibilities both in terms of an extremely demanding, you know, live performance schedule in terms of maintaining a recording schedule and recording the artists on his own label and really constantly being on the go and constantly meeting his obligations and always and improving his possibility, his situation. You know there was never any evidence of that kind of behavior.
CONAN: You were mentioning, though, his son Vince who as a baby fell into a swimming pool, the cover had been left off. And that not all that far from the end of Sam's life.
Mr. GURALNICK: No, no, and I think that that marked a period of great sadness even in the midst of great achievement, so that while his career and while on the surface everything went well, it marked a, there was both self-blame and I think he and his wife Barbara blamed each other. So that it led to a great deal of friction in a marriage which already had its share of friction.
CONAN: Yeah, you could say and be truthful that he married his childhood sweetheart and that would be the most misleading thing you could probably say.
MR. GURALNICK: Well, it would and it wouldn't, because in a certain way, I think, they never fell out of love, but the love that they shared was not the love that exists in story books. It was not an easy kind of love and there was constant friction and I think the great heartbreak in his wife's life, who was perceived in many different ways by many people around her, but was perhaps one of the most honest people that I've ever met, one of the most brutally honest in terms of not just other people but herself.
Just the great heartbreak of her life was that she never could make a place for herself in Sam's. And that while she would have given anything to have become more a part of his life with his, not just his professional life, but I mean of his whole life. And she did everything she could to do that. But, I mean, it's funny. Like so many entertainers I would say that at heart Sam was an almost solitary person. And I think you find that, you know, you find that to be true of a great many entertainers who go out, charm the world, and yet in their own selves are more contemplative, more solitary and more brooding than you would every imagine from their public persona.
CONAN: He had that ability you describe of being what people wanted him to be. Being utterly sincere and convincing at the moment that they were with him, but being able to turn on that, you know, being detached from that in the same way. Almost as if he's observing himself.
MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. No, I think that that's, I mean you can call that a protean personality, you know, where you can, but I mean, but I think it suggests the same problems of intimacy again that so many entertainers have or so many people have. I mean it really it's unfair just to put it on enter, but entertainers are placed in the position, entertainers are like politicians, it's similar to, you know, you can see this let's say in someone like Bill Clinton or in Elvis, both of whom clearly want to be loved by everybody and put forth a persona that allows them to be loved and accepted by the crowd, but the question is who are they, you know, when they're by themselves at night.
CONAN: We're talking with Peter Guralnick about his new book, Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's talk now with Nordine(ph). Nordine calling us from Tucson, Arizona.
NORDINE (Caller): Yes, hi Pete, Neal.
MR. GURALNICK: Hi.
CONAN: Hi.
NORDINE: I just wondered if Pete had a, was aware of the impact that Sam Cooke made in my generation. (Unintelligible), song, especially the song you just played, The Chain Gang, and he really, really inspired us and helped us all in (unintelligible).
CONAN: I'm sorry, Nordine, we're having trouble hearing you. Did you say you drew up in France?
NORDINE: Yes, I'm French. and I moved about ten years ago here and I moved because I was inspired by Sam Cooke. Sam Cooke is and was an icon, an American Icon in Europe, especially in France.
CONAN: Did you know the words when you were listening?
NORDINE: I didn't know the words. We're singing after him and the words (unintelligible) inspired by his voice and the music. And until today, now that I understand everything that he says, it's really moving, you know, and I just want your listeners to know that Sam Cooke had an impact on all of us in France, especially North African children dealing with racism.
CONAN: Oh, Nordine thank you very much for the call.
NORDINE: Thanks so much.
CONAN: Appreciate that. And I guess Peter Guralnick, there's a testament.
MR. GURALNICK: Well, you know, I think that to some extent is a testament as well to the universality of music. I mean the way in which say the Blues has reached around the world to an audience that may very well not understand the words, but it's the way in which that's that direct impact communication of the songs of someone like Sam Cooke, of a whole variety of people. And the emotional core that lies at the heart of Sam Cooke songs that allows them to communicate in a way that is beyond language I think.
It's what Ray Charles said of him. I spoke to Ray Charles just a few months before he died and he said, you know, Sam Cooke was the one and only. He knew Sam from the time Sam was singing with The Soul Stirrers, they would get together. Ray would get, they would all be staying at the same little hotels because of course black entertainers whether they were Gospel singers or they were R&B singers, or Pop singers or if they were sports figures there was only one little hotel in town who would take African Americans. They couldn't stay in a white hotel.
So on Sunday morning Ray Charles would talk about how he would get together with J.W. Alexander and The Pilgrim Travelers and Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers and how they would just sing Gospel music. But he said of Sam, Sam was the one and only. Not only did he hit every note, he hit every note with feeling. And as Ray pointed out to me, I'm not one to hand out compliments lightly.
CONAN: The stories about those meetings, either back stage or in those hotels, there's a description of a scene with Clyde McPhatter, I think, on one of the tours, another person who came from Gospel, but of Clyde McPhatter and Sam Cooke trading lines and songs and you would have given anything to be there.
MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. No, no, I mean, it's just, the musicality of these singers, I mean, and it's something that, it hasn't been lost, but I mean when we talk about the golden age of Gospel, which was, you know, roughly say from 1950 to 1960 but continue, I mean, you have great, great Gospel singing. The Mighty Clouds of Joy came in right around '60 or '61. but the point is that you had, it was just every night you had the kind of exchanges and the kind of competition that is almost beyond imagined and then, you know, with the Soul shows and I used to usher the Soul shows. We would have Otis Redding and Solomon Burke and Jackie Wilson and again, I mean, these are the shows that Sam would go out with, Sam and Jackie Wilson, for example.
And the competition and the way in which the music alone would elevate them, you know, beyond anything that can be imagined from the records alone. And anyone who's ever been at any of those shows and, what you describe, what you describe was on a backstage thing. Which I think either Phil or Don Everly described to me. He said that they would be singing Country and Western songs with Clyde McPhatter and Sam Cooke backstage. But just the sheer musicality and the way in which music served as an instrument of communication. I know that I wish I had the eloquence but Sam Phillips just used to declaim to me about the way in which music had changed the world, could change the world, would continue to change the world, you know. He would say put some of those musicians over there in Iraq and that'll be the end of the war.
CONAN: Well, I'm not sure about that, but music…
MR. GURALNICK: We can hope.
CONAN: …music helped change the country in the early ‘60s and of course what was going on in the country changed a lot of the music as well. And we'll talk about that with Peter Guralnick when we come back from a break. Again, his new book is about the triumph of Sam Cooke. It's called Dream Boogie. 800-989-8255. TALK OF THE NATION has an email address too. That's talk@npr.org. And this is NPR News.
CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
Today we're talking about Gospel, Pop, and R&B legend Sam Cooke. With us is Peter Guralnick. His new biography is Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke. If you'd like to read an excerpt of that book and listen to some of Sam Cooke's classic songs you can visit our website at npr.org. If you'd like to get in on the conversation 800-989-8255 or email us: talk@npr.org. And let's get another caller on the line. This is Michael. Michael's calling us from Cleveland.
MICHAEL (Caller): Neal, how are you?
CONAN: I'm well, Michael.
MICHAEL: Great. Peter, thank you very much for the book. I really enjoyed it.
MR. GURALNICK: Oh, thank you.
MICHAEL: And I have a story that I'd like to share with you. I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York. And a local group, The Five Star Gospel singers would open for Sam Cooke and The Soul Stirrers when they would come into town. And my father was a member of that group. And it was a performance where Sam really lit the church up and he made my mother cry so much that after the performance when I was with my father and my father said, say hi to Sam. I wouldn't say hi. My father says, why won't you say hi and I said, because he made mommy cry.
MR. GURALNICK: Now, would that be at Washington Temple in Brooklyn?
MICHAEL: That was definitely, yeah, that was Brown's Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Right off of Gates and Washington.
CONAN: That's a great story, Michael.
MICHAEL: Peter, thank you very much and keep it up. I enjoyed both of the books.
MR. GURALNICK: Well thanks. And I hope you were at the shows in Cleveland. The tribute to Sam Cooke.
MICHAEL: I was out of town and I missed it, but I heard it was really great.
CONAN: Michael thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it.
MICHAEL: Thanks a lot, Neal. Appreciate the show.
CONAN: And Sam Cooke had that affect on a lot of women.
MR. GURALNICK: Yeah. No, he could make them cry and, I mean, it was a very, it was a deeply emotional kind of music and Sam's whole point was that if you couldn't bring that emotion to it, if you couldn't bring that feeling to it then don't do it. I mean that was the core of the music, despite the fact that he was a deeply reflective person, a highly analytic person, and really an intellectual. Somebody who was not just a veracious reader, but someone who pursued his reading in directions.
For example, he took up, he was inspired by the work of John Hope Franklin, by specifically From Slavery to Freedom to begin his study of black history. And he soon acquired a library of black history and, you know, that would rival anybody's. he used to go out to a bookstore in Los Angeles called The Aquarian Bookstore, one of the few in the country that had that kind of, you know, that had that, that had those kinds of books. But the point is that for all of that, for all of his intellectuality, for all of his acuity of mind, for all of his the way in which his analytic cast of mind, his whole point about music was you had to bring the feeling to it. And that what's brought the feeling out in the audiences.
CONAN: Let's talk now with John. John calling from Syracuse, New York.
JOHN (Caller): Yes, Neal, thanks for taking my call.
CONAN: Mm hmm.
JOHN: I had recently read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which I highly recommend to everyone and in researching Sam Cooke recently I understand (unintelligible) with Malcolm X at the Liston and Clay fight in the early ‘60s and my question is about Sam Cooke's politics. I know that at the time of his death he had written A Change is Gonna Come. I'm wondering what kind of political activities he was undertaking and what he might have undertaken?
CONAN: You know how long it was and it's still referred to as Cassius Clay, of course we know him as Muhammad Ali.
JOHN: I know it's Muhammad Ali. I'm just, at the time I know Clay/Liston, so.
CONAN: At the time, Cassius Clay. Peter Guralnick?
MR. GURALNICK: Well, I mean, again, as a deeply reflective person as a, you know, a person of color in a world in which the color line was clearly drawn and in which prejudice was not just prevalent, but just omnivorous. Sam was somebody who was deeply sensitive to racial issues, to racial hurt, and who in the course of his career took a number of stands that some entertainers did and some entertainers didn't. I mean, for example, he and Clyde McPhatter refused to play in Memphis at the Ellis Auditorium at a segregated show after the NAACP had pointed out, had requested them not to play. And everybody else on the bill played and Sam and Clyde McPhatter refused and made statements to the paper at risk to themselves, at personal peril that, with threats, with financial threats and the threat of their cars being confiscated.
And there were any number of incidents like that, including his refusal to be turned away from a segregated motel in Shreveport, Louisiana, which is one of the three point of impetus for his writing, A Change is Gonna Come. But, I think that he was becoming more and more explicit in his political activity, more and more of an activist towards the end of his life. And in fact, after the fight, in Miami after Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston in Miami because as you said, as you pointed out he was yet to become Mohammad Ali. Clay, rather than go to the Fontainebleau for a big victory party that had been planned, or going off with his girlfriend Dee Dee, I'm forgetting her last name right now, went back to the Hampton House where Malcolm X was staying with Sam, with Jim Brown.
And the FBI informant who was there reported back to J. Edgar Hoover with considerable alarm that these sports and entertainment figures should be getting together to express their common dissatisfaction over issues of color. So, more and more, over the course of the last few years of his life, Sam was not just aware of something which no person of color could fail to be aware of. More and more he was inclined to take action and he had just, he had donated his song, A Change is Gonna Come to an album, which was a benefit album for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the summer of '64. There were any number of things which he had planned.
CONAN: John thanks very much.
JOHN: Yes, thank you.
CONAN: And, Peter Guralnick, we just have a couple of minutes left but you said earlier Sam Cooke did not have an alcohol problem. As such, people in your book say repeatedly he never smoked dope, never took pills.
Mr. GURALNICK: Right.
CONAN: There was a dark side of his character though, he was a womanizer. And, the night he died he was certainly drunk.
Mr. GURALNICK: He was he had been drinking certainly, yeah. I mean and was, I don't think there's any way of measuring how much he had drunk. But he certainly had been, he had been drinking. I think the point is that like, if you look to anybody else in the book, he was in the life like everybody else in the book. Like Ray Charles, like Lloyd Price, like B.B. King and I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who wasn't a womanizer, which is neither to condemn or condone.
But what was so difficult about his death to accept was, that simply, people couldn't accept it because it was, it simply wasn't the way it should have been. And I think that, for someone as smooth, as urbane, as sophisticated as Sam Cooke, it just, it simply should not have come to an end in that way. Now, that's as if there were some rational impulse behind the way in which any of us die. But as J.W. Alexander said, and J.W. believed that, this was his friend this was his best friend in the world. And he felt that it was a tragic accident, it was simply a senseless waste of life.
He didn't doubt that it happened the way it was said to have happened. But, I think, to see it as a senseless waste of life would be the best way to see it. But the way in which the community reacted to it was essentially, I think there was almost universal disbelief, because Sam was such a shining light within the black community. And, the conspiracies that were constructed to explain it all make perfect sense in the sense that, they see Sam as being a, this was the case of another proud black man struck down by the white establishment that just couldn't stand to see him get any bigger. Which, in view of the prevalent, you know the prejudice that was so pervasive it was just, ran through every aspect of American life and continues to in many respects. It's a perfectly rational explanation and maybe you know, tomorrow somebody's gonna walk in the door with the evidence to prove these, any one of these theories. But so far no evidence has been, you know has been presented.
CONAN: Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, Peter Guralnick thank you very much for being with us today.
Mr. GURALNICK: Well thanks I've really enjoyed it.
CONAN: You mentioned, Change is Gonna Come an anthem of sorts, for the civil rights movement, let's go out of this segment listening to that.
(Soundbite of song 'Change is Gonna Come')
CONAN: Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Sunday marks the 75th anniversary of the birth of Sam Cooke, one
of the most famous gospel and pop singers in American music history.
Along with Ray Charles, Cooke was one of the earliest artists to span
both musical genres. By the end of his career, he heralded the advent of
soul. Cooke's magical voice animated a long string of hits
that came to a sudden end, when he was shot and killed in a motel
manager's office in 1964, at the age of 33.
Writer Peter Guralnick talks about his biography of Cooke, Dream Boogie,
which sets the singer and songwriter in the context of his times, his
ambitions, his enormous accomplishments — and his dark side.
Excerpt: 'Dream Boogie, the Triumph of Sam Cooke'
Peter Guralnick
"Let me tell you a story on Sam. Sam was always
ambitious. He always knew exactly what he wanted to do. When we was very
little boys, we were playing, and he had these popsicle sticks — you
know them little wooden sticks? He had about twenty of them, and he
lined them sticks up, stuck 'em in the ground, and said, "This is my
audience, see? I'm gonna sing to these sticks." He said, "This prepare
me for my future." Another time he said, "Hey, C., you know what?" I
said, "What?" He said, "I figured out my life, man." He said, "I'm never
gonna have a nine-to-five job." I said, "What you mean, Sam?" He said,
"Man, I figured out the whole system." He said, "It's designed, if you
work, to keep you working, all you do is live from payday to payday — at
the end of the week you broke again." He said, "The system is designed
like that." And I'm listening. I'm seven and he's nine, and he's talking
about "the system"! I said, "What are you gonna do, then, if you ain't
gonna work, Sam?" He said, "I'm gonna sing, and I'm going to make me a
lot of money." And that's just what he did."
— L.C. Cooke, on his brother's early ambitions
[Note: Cooke added the 'e' at the end of his name later in life, as did his brother.]
Sam
Cook was a golden child around whom a family mythology was constructed,
long before he achieved fame or added the e to his last name.
There
are all the stories about Sam as a child: how he was endowed with
second sight; how he sang to the sticks; how he convinced his
neighborhood "gang" to tear the slats off backyard fences, then sold
them to their previous owners for firewood; how he was marked with a
gift from earliest childhood on and never wavered from its fulfillment.
He was the adored middle child of a Church of Christ (Holiness) minister with untrammeled ambitions for his children.
Movies
were strictly forbidden. So were sports, considered gambling because
the outcome inevitably determined a winner and a loser. Church took up
all day Sunday, with preparations starting on Saturday night.
They
were respectable, upwardly mobile, proud members of a proudly striving
community, but they didn't shrink from a fight. Their daddy told them to
stand up for themselves and their principles, no matter what the
situation was. Respect your elders, respect authority — but if you were
in the right, don't back down for anyone, not the police, not the white
man, not anyone. One time neighborhood bullies tried to block Sam's way
to school, and he told them he didn't care if he had to fight them every
day, he was going to school. He lived in a world in which he was told
hard work would be rewarded, but he could see evidence to the contrary
all around him. Their father told them that their true reward would come
in heaven, but Sam was unwilling to wait. He was unwilling to live in a
world of superstition and fear, and even his father's strictures and
homilies were subject to the same rational skepticism, the same
unwavering gaze with which he seemed to have been born. He was
determined to live his life by his own lights and no one else's.
He
was born January 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the fifth of the
Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae's eight children (the
oldest, Willie, was Annie Mae's first cousin, whom they took in at three
upon his mother's death). Charles and Annie Mae met at a Church of
Christ (Holiness) convention at which he was preaching, and they started
going to church together. He was a young widower of twenty-three with a
child that was being raised by his late wife's family. Born to
sharecroppers in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1897, he had been baptized
into the Holiness church at the age of eight, and when the church split
in two a couple of years later (its founders, Charles Price Jones and
Charles Harrison Mason, differed over the importance of speaking in
tongues as certain confirmation of "spirit baptism," with Mason
declaring this surrender to a force that overcomes recognizable human
speech to be a sure sign of grace), the Cooks remained with the
Jackson-based Reverend Jones, while Reverend Mason's followers became
the better-known, more populous (and more prosperous) Memphis-based
Church of God in Christ.
Just fourteen when she met Charles,
Annie Mae was fair-skinned, round-faced, with hair she could sit on.
She was sixteen when they married in November of 1923. She had grown up
in Mound Bayou, a self-sufficient all-black township founded in 1887 and
known as "the negro capital of Mississippi." The granddaughter of a
businessman reputed, according to family legend, to be "the
second-wealthiest man in Mound Bayou," she was raised by an aunt after
her mother died in childbirth. She was working as a cook when she met
her future husband and by her husband's account won him over with her
culinary skills, inviting him home from church one day and producing a
four-course meal in the forty-five minutes between services.
They
had three children (Mary, Charles Jr., and Hattie), spaced eighteen
months to two years apart, before Sam was born in January of 1931, with
his brother L.C. ("it don't stand for nothing") following twenty-three
months later.
Within weeks of L.C.'s birth Charles Cook was
on the road, hitchhiking to Chicago with a fellow preacher with
thirty-five cents in his pocket. It was the Lord who had convinced him
he couldn't fail, but it was his children's education, and the
opportunity he was determined to give them to get ahead, that provided
the burning motivation. He had sharecropped, worked on the railroad, and
most recently been a houseboy in one of Clarksdale's wealthiest homes
while continuing to do the Lord's work as a Holiness circuit preacher —
but he was not prepared to consign his children to the same fate. He was
thirty-five years old at the time, and as certain of his reasons
sixty-three years later. "It was to educate my children. It was a better
chance up here. In Mississipi they didn't even furnish you with the
schoolbooks. But I didn't put nothing ahead of God."
Charles
Cook preached his way to Chicago, "mostly for white folks, they give me
food and money," he said, for a sermon that satisfactorily answered the
"riddle" of salvation, "proving that man could pray his self out of
hell." Within weeks of his arrival, he had found work and sent for his
wife and children, who arrived on a Greyhound bus at the Twelfth Street
station, the gateway to Chicago's teeming South Side.
It was
a whole different world in Chicago, a separate self-contained world in
which the middle class mingled with the lowest down, in which black
doctors and lawyers and preachers and schoolteachers strove to establish
standards and set realistic expectations for a community that included
every type of individual engaged in every type of human endeavor, from
numbers kings to domestics, from street players to steel workers, from
race heroes to self-made millionaires. It was a society which, despite a
form of segregation as cruel and pernicious as the Southern kind, could
not be confined or defined, a society of which almost all of its
variegated members, nearly every one of them an immigrant from what was
commonly referred to as South America, felt an integral part. It was a
society into which the Cook family immediately fit.
From the
moment of his arrival, Reverend Cook found his way to Christ Temple
Cathedral, an imposing edifice which the Church of Christ (Holiness) had
purchased for $55,000 six years earlier, just ten years after its
modest prayer-meeting beginnings in the Federal Street home of Brother
Holloway. He preached an occasional sermon and served as a faithful
congregant and assistant pastor while working a number of jobs,
including for a brief time selling burial insurance, before he found
steady employment at the Reynolds Metals plant in McCook, Illinois, some
fifteen miles out of town, where he would eventually rise to a position
as union shop steward.
The family lived briefly in a
kitchenette apartment on Thirty-third and State but soon moved into more
comfortable surroundings on the fourth floor of the four-story Lenox
Building, at 3527 Cottage Grove Avenue (there were five separately
numbered entrances to the Lenox Building, with the back porches all
interconnected), in the midst of a busy neighborhood not far from the
lake. There was a drugstore on the corner, the Blue Goose grocery store
was just up the street, and directly across from the Blue Goose was a
chicken market where you could select your own live chicken and have it
killed and dressed on the spot. Westpoint Baptist Church was on the
other side of the street, all the players hung out at the poolroom on
Thirty-sixth, and Ellis Park, an elegant enclave of privately owned row
houses surrounding a park with two swimming pools in the middle, ran
between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh across Cottage Grove.
The
new baby, Agnes, was almost two years old when Reverend Cook, through
the intervention of one of his original Jackson mentors, Bishop J. L. I.
Conic, finally got his own congregation at Christ Temple Church in
Chicago Heights, some thirty miles out of town. This quickly became the
focus of the Cooks' family life.
We was in church every time
that church door was open. That was a must, no ifs, ands, or buts about
it. Saturday night Mama would cook our dinner. Then we'd all get up
about 6:30 Sunday morning, 'cause everyone had to take their bath —
seven children, one bathroom! — so we could be dressed and be at church
at nine o'clock for Sunday school. After Sunday school you had eleven
o'clock service, with prayer and singing, and Papa would do the sermon
for the day. Then Mama would take us to the basement and heat up our
food in the church kitchen. Then we had afternoon service, and after
that BYPU, which is a young people's service, then the eight o'clock
service until about 10 o'clock, when we would go home. Plus Wednesday
night prayer meeting! One time Mary, our oldest sister — she was used to
doing what she wanted — decided she wasn't going to go to church. She
said, "I know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to wash my hair, and then I'm
going to tell Papa, ‘I can't go to church 'cause I just got my hair
washed, and I haven't got it done.'" Well, she washed her hair, and she
told Papa, but he just said, "That's all right, just come right on." So
she had to go to church with her hair all a mess. Papa didn't play. You
had to either go to church or get out of his house. — Hattie, Agnes, and L.C. Cook in a spirited chorus of voices recalling their early religious training
The
Chicago Heights church, which had first been organized in 1919, grew
dramatically under Reverend Cook's stewardship. The "seventeen" previous
ministers, he told gospel historian David Tenenbaum, had been able to
do nothing to increase the size or fervor of a congregation made up for
the most part of workers from the local Ford assembly plant, but,
Reverend Cook said, "I worked up to one hundred and twenty-five, I
filled the church up. You had to be sure to come there on time if you
wanted a seat." He was, according to his daughter Agnes, a
"fire-and-brimstone country preacher" who always sang before he
preached, strictly the old songs — two of his favorites were "You Can't
Hurry God" and "This Little Light of Mine." He took his sermon from a
Bible text and was known to preach standing on one leg for two minutes
at a time when he got carried away by his message. The congregation was
vocal in its response, shouting, occasionally speaking in tongues, with
church mothers dressed in nurse's whites prepared to attend to any of
the congregation who were overcome. The Cooks didn't shout, but Annie
Mae would cry sometimes, her children could always tell when the sermon
really got to her and her spirit was full by the tears streaming down
her cheeks. The other ladies in the congregation were equally moved, for
despite his stern demeanor, the Reverend Cook was a handsome man — and
despite his numerous strictures, as his children were well aware, the
Reverend Cook definitely had an eye for the ladies. Annie Mae sang in
the choir, which was accompanied by a girl named Flora on piano, and
different groups would come out occasionally to present spiritual and
gospel music programs. One group in particular, the Progressive Moaners,
became regular visitors — they always got a good response — and that is
what gave the Reverend Cook the idea for the Singing Children.
The
Cook children were all musical, but Charles, the next-to-oldest, was
the heart and soul of the family group. He was eleven, "and I had to
sing every Sunday in church, my daddy used to make me sing all the time,
stop me from going out in the street and playing with my friends." He
and his big sister, Mary, sang lead in the five-member quartet. Hattie,
who was eight, sang baritone; Sam, already focused on music as a career
at six, sang tenor; and L.C., the baby of the group, was their
four-year-old bass singer.
They practiced at home at first
but soon were "upsetting" the church on a regular basis, taking the
Progressive Moaners' place at the center of the service and in the
process reflecting as much on their father, Reverend Cook, as on
themselves. They sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "They Nailed Him
to the Cross" with Flora accompanying them. "We just practiced our own
selves and decided what songs we was going to sing," recalled Hattie.
"Every time the church doors opened we had to be there."
Before
long they were going around to other churches and leading off their
father's out-of-town revivals in Indianapolis and Gary and Kankakee. The
entire family traveled together, all nine of them, generally staying
with the minister, but not infrequently having to split up among various
church households due to the size of the group. Each of the Singing
Children had a freshness and charm. They were a good-looking family,
even the boys had pretty, long bangs, and the church ladies used to
cluck over that baby bass singer who put himself into the music so
earnestly, and the handsome lead singer — he was a big boy who carried
himself in a manly fashion — but no one missed the little tenor singer,
either, the one with the sparkle in his eye, who could just melt your
heart with the way he communicated the spirit of the song. Sometimes,
when he got too many preaching engagements, Reverend Cook would send
them to sing in his place. "When they'd come back, the people would tell
me, say, ‘Anytime you can't come, Preach, just send the children to
sing.'"
All the children were proud of what they were doing,
both for themselves and for their father. And their father was proud of
them, not only for causing the Cook family sound (his sound) to become
more widely known but for adding substantially to his store of
entrepreneurial activities: the church, the revivals, the riders he
carried out to Reynolds each day for a fee in his nearly brand-new 1936
Chevrolet, soon to be replaced by a Hudson Terraplane, and, when Charles
was old enough to drive, a pair of limousines ("Brother, I made my
money!" he was wont to declare in later years with unabashed pride).
But
Charles, a gruff, sometimes taciturn boy with a disinclination to show
his sensitivity, soon grew disenchanted with the spotlight. "Aw, man, my
daddy used to make me sing too much. I used to get so tired of singing I
said, I'm gonna get up there and mess up, and he won't ask me to sing
no more, but once I got up there, that song would get so good, shit, I
couldn't mess up. I couldn't mess up. But I said, if I ever get grown,
if I ever make twenty-one, I'm not going to sing for nobody. And I
didn't."
Meanwhile, Sam, the irrepressible middle child,
made no secret of his own impatience for the spotlight. Even L.C., who
slept in the same room with him and appreciated wholeheartedly his
brother's wit and spark, was taken aback by Sam's undisguised ambition.
Charles could easily have resented his brother's importunity, but
instead he retained a strictly pragmatic point of view. "Well, he had
such a pretty little tenor — I mean, it was kind of undescribable, his
tone, his singing. But we didn't have nobody to replace him. So we
wouldn't let him lead. We were the lead singers, my sister and I. We
pretty much had the say-so."
It was a busy life. The
children all went to Doolittle Elementary School just two blocks west of
the Lenox Building, and they were all expected to do well. Both parents
checked their homework, though even at an early age the children became
aware that their mother possessed more formal schooling than their
father, and she would even substitute-teach at Doolittle on occasion.
Reverend Cook, on the other hand, conveyed a kind of uncompromising
rectitude and pride, which, in all of their recollection, he was
determined to instill in his children. "He had a saying," said his
youngest daughter, Agnes, "that he would write in everybody's course
book when they graduated, and he would recite it to you constantly:
‘Once a task is once begun / Never stop until it's done / Be the labor
great or small / Do it well or not at all.' He always told us, ‘If
you're going to shine shoes, be the best shoe-shine boy out there. If
you're going to sweep a street, be the best street sweeper. Whatever you
strive to be, be the best at it, whether it's a small job or working in
top management.' He always felt that you could do anything that you put
your mind to."
Everyone was expected to contribute. The
girls did the housework. Willie, the oldest, the adopted cousin, was
already sixteen and working for the Jewish butcher at the chicken market
across the street. At eleven, Charles went to work as a delivery boy
for the Blue Goose grocery store. Even the little boys helped their
mother with her shopping. Charles joined the Deacons, a
neighborhood gang. Sam and L.C. freely roamed the streets, but there was
only so much you could get away with, because the neighborhood
functioned, really, as an extended family; if you got too out of hand,
the neighbors would correct you, even go so far as to physically
chastise you, and Reverend and Mrs. Cook would certainly do the same.
There
were still white people in the neighborhood when the Cooks moved in,
but by now almost all its residents were black, the shopkeepers
uniformly white — and yet the children for the most part thought little
about segregation because their exposure was limited to the fact, but
not the experience, of it. Reverend Cook, on the other hand, was
unwilling to see his children, or anyone else in the family for that
matter, treated like second-class citizens. One time the police
confronted Charles on the street, and Reverend Cook, in his children's
recollection, came out of the house and said, "Don't you mess around
with my kids. If there is something wrong, you come and get me." And
when the policeman touched his holstered gun, their father said, "I'll
whip that pistol off you." He meant it, according to his children, "and
the police knew he meant it. Our daddy wasn't bashful about nothing. He
always told us to hold our head high and speak our mind. ‘Don't you all
run from nobody.'"
It was a family above all, one that, no
matter what internal frictions might arise, always stuck together.
Charles might feel resentment against his father and long for the day
when he could find some escape; the girls might very well feel that it
was unfair that the boys had no household responsibilities; Sam and L.C.
might fight every day just in the course of normal events. "We was
always together," said L.C. "We slept together, we grew up together.
Sometimes we'd be in bed at the end of the day, and Sam would say, ‘Hey,
we didn't fight today,' and we'd fight right there in the bed — that's
how close we were!" But the moment that the outside world intruded,
Cooks, as their father constantly reminded them, stood up for one
another. Mess with one Cook, mess with all.
The children all
took their baths before their father came home from work ("We could
tell it was him by the lights of his car"). Then they would sit down at
the round kitchen table and have dinner together, every night without
exception. They weren't allowed to eat at somebody else's house ("If you
had a friend, bring them home"). Their mother, who addressed her
husband unfailingly as "Brother Cook," never made them eat anything they
didn't like and often cooked something special for one or another of
her children. Chicken and dumplings, chicken and dressing, and homemade
dinner rolls were the favorites, along with red beans and rice. None of
them doubted for a moment that Mama loved him or her best of all. She
lived for her children, as she told them over and over, and she prayed
every night that she would live to see them grown, because "she did not
want a stepmother over her children."
After dinner, in the
summertime especially, they might go for a drive. They might go to the
airport to watch the planes take off; they might go to the park or just
ride around downtown. On weekends they would all go to the zoo
sometimes, and every summer they had family picnics by the pavilion at
Red Gate Woods, part of the forest preserve, family picnics for which
their mother provided baskets of food and at which attendance was not
optional.
Once a year the family attended the national
Church of Christ (Holiness) convention in Annapolis, Detroit, St. Louis,
and every summer they drove to Mississippi, spending Reverend Cook's
two-week vacation from Reynolds shuttling back and forth among their
various relatives all over the state, with Reverend Cook preaching (and
the Singing Children accompanying him) wherever they went.
The
preparations for the trip were always busy and exciting, with Mama
staying up the night before frying chicken and making pound cake because
there was nowhere on the road for a black family to stop. Papa did all
the driving, at least until Charles turned fifteen, and after the first
hour or so, everyone started to get hungry and beg Mama for a chicken
leg or wing out of the shoe boxes in which she had packed the food. They
all sang together in the car, silly songs like "Merrily, We Roll
Along," and read off the Burma-Shave signs that unspooled their message
sign by sign on the side of the highway. They all remembered one
sequence in particular year after year. The first sign said "Papa liked
the shave," the next "Mama liked the jar," then "Both liked the cream,"
and, finally, "So there you are!" One time, Agnes recalled, they ran out
of bread for the cold cuts, and Papa sent her and her sixteen-year-old
sister, Mary, into a grocery store — she couldn't have been more than
five or six at the time. "Well, Mary went in and picked up the loaf of
bread and put it on the counter just like she do anywhere else, just
like she would do at home, and the man said, ‘You're not from around
here, are you?' So she says no, and he said, ‘When you come in here, you
ask me for what you want, and I'll get it for you.' So she said, ‘I'm
buying it. I don't see why I can't pick it up. I'm taking it with me.'"
It
was a very different way of life. Charles and Mary went out in the
fields to pick cotton, but, L.C. said, he and Sam had no interest in
that kind of work ("We were out there playing with the little girls,
trying to get them in the cotton gin"), and Hattie, who did, was forced
to take care of Agnes. One time Sam and L.C. were watching their
grandfather pull up some logs in a field, "and he just throwed the
horse's reins down when he seen us coming," said L.C. "Well, Sam got
tangled up in the reins, and they had to run and catch the horse. And we
got Sam back to the house, and he was all right, but I never will
forget, he said, ‘That horse tried to kill me.' I said, ‘No, Sam, the
horse was just spooked. She wasn't trying to kill you.' He said, ‘No —
Nelly tried to kill me!'"
They met far-flung relatives on
both sides of the family who had never left Mississippi, including their
mother's cousin Mabel, who lived in Shaw and was more like a sister to
her, and their father's brother George, who sharecropped outside of
Greenville. Their grandmother, L.C. said, was always trying to get Sam
and him to stay with her. "She would say, ‘You got to come live with
us,' but I had a little joke I'd tell her. I said, ‘You know what? If
Mama and them hadn't of moved and left Mississippi, as soon as I'd
gotten big enough to walk, I'd have walked out!' They used to laugh at
me and say, ‘Boy, you're so crazy.'"
Papa preached and they
sang all over the state. To Hattie, "It was really a learning
experience," but from Charles' point of view, "We was glad to get there,
glad to leave." They saw their father as a stern but fair
man, but their mother was someone they could tell their secrets to. She
treated their friends with the same kind of gentle consideration that
she showed all of them, never reluctant to add another place to the
table or take a mattress and lay it on the floor. "I don't know where
one of you all might be," she told them by way of explanation, "maybe
someone will help you some day in the same way." If any one of them was
in a play and just said "Boo," why, then, to their mother, they were
"the best booer in the world."
None of them was ever really
singled out. Papa whipped all of them equally, and Mama rewarded them
all the same — but even within the family Sam stood out. To L.C.,
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, someone who by his own account, and
everyone else's, too, "always thought like a man," Sam was similar — but
at the same time altogether different. "Hey, I thought I had a
personality. But Sam had the personality. He could charm the birds out
of the trees."
If you tried to calculate just what it was,
you would never be able to figure it out. There were other little boys
just as good-looking, and there were undoubtedly others just as bright —
but there was something about him, all of his siblings agreed, whether
it was the infectiousness of his grin, or his unquenchable enthusiasm,
or the insatiable nature of his curiosity, he possessed a spark that
just seemed to light a fire under everyone he was around. He was a great
storyteller and he always had something to tell you — but it was the
way he communicated it, the way he made you feel as if you were the only
person in the world and that what he was communicating to you was
something he had never told anyone else before: there was a seemingly
uncalculated spontaneity even to what his brothers and sisters knew to
be his most calculated actions. He was always calling attention to
himself. "He loved to play little pranks," his sister Agnes said, "and
he could think of more jokes than anyone else." But why his actions
failed to cause more jealousy or resentment than they did, no one could
fully explain. Unless it was simply, as L.C. said, "he was just
likeable."
To his older sister Hattie, Sam always had his
own way of doing things. Sam and L.C. and Charles all pooled their
collection of marbles, "but Sam liked to be by himself a lot, too, and
he would take those marbles and have them be like boxers in the ring —
he made up all kinds of things." For that same reason, to
his ninety-eight-year-old father looking back on it all thirty-two years
after his son's death, "Sam was a peculiar child. He was always
headman, he was always at the post, from a kid on what he said went.
He'd just be walking along the street and make a song out of it. If he
said it was a song, it was a song all the way through."
The
others could see the contributions their next-to-youngest member made
even to such familiar spirituals and jubilee numbers as "Deep River,"
"Swing Down, Chariot, Let Me Ride," and "Going Home," not to mention the
more modern quartet style of Birmingham's Famous Blue Jays and the Five
Soul Stirrers from Houston, both of whom had recently moved to the
neighborhood. Spiritual music was at a crossroads, with the older style
of singing, which the Reverend Cook favored — "sorrow songs" from
slavery times along with the more up-tempo "jubilee"-style rhythmic
narratives of the enormously influential Golden Gate Quartet — giving
way to a more direct emotional style. This was the new quartet sound,
with five- or six-member groups like the Stirrers expanding on the
traditional parts while featuring alternating lead singers who egged
each other on to a level of histrionics previously confined to the
Pentecostal Church. Their driving attack mimicked the sound, as well as
the message, of gospel preaching, and their repertoire, too, frequently
sprang from more accessible personal testimony, like the "gospel blues"
compositions of Thomas A. Dorsey. To the Singing Children it made little
difference, they sang it all. Their repertoire was aimed at pleasing
their audience, but they were drawn to the exciting new quartet sound.
Anything the Soul Stirrers or the Blue Jays sang, they learned
immediately off the record. But Sam's ability to rearrange verses or
rhyme up familiar Bible stories to make a song was not lost on any of
them, least of all the Reverend Cook.
It wasn't long before
the Singing Children had a manager of their own, a friend of their
father's named David Peale who owned a filling station and had plenty of
money. He set up church bookings for them, established a firm fee
structure ("We charged fifteen cents' admission, and we wouldn't sing if
we didn't get paid"), drove them to their engagements in a white
Cadillac limousine, and collected the money at the door. They had quite a
following, according to Agnes, still too young to join the group.
"Everywhere they went, they would turn the church out."
Sam
accepted Christ at eleven, in 1942, just after America had entered the
war — but like all of his brothers and sisters, the religion that he
embraced seemed to have less to do with the Church of Christ (Holiness)
or their father's strictures than the simple precepts that Reverend Cook
had taught them: show respect to get respect, if you treat people
right, they in turn will do right by you. At the same time, as Reverend
Cook was equally quick to point out, there was no prohibition in the
Bible against worldly success; in fact, there were many verses that
endorsed it, and as proud as he was of his ability to put enough food on
the table to feed a family of ten — and to have recently acquired two
late-model limousines, a radio, a telephone, and a brand-new windup
phonograph — he was equally determined that his children should learn to
make their own way in the world.
Sam took this lesson in
the spirit, but perhaps not quite in the manner, that his father
intended. He established his own business with a group of neighborhood
kids, with his brother L.C. serving as his chief lieutenant and himself
as CEO. "Yeah, tearing out people's fences and then sell it back to them
for firewood at twenty cents a basket. We did that; Sam didn't do it —
he get the money. Sam would have me and Louis Truelove and Slick and Dan
Lofton (there was about five of us) to go tear out the fence and chop
the wood up — naw, they didn't know it was their fence — and then as
soon as we get the money, he take half of everybody's but mine."
He
was a mischievous, inquisitive child, always testing the limits but,
unlike L.C., not inclined to measure the consequences of his every
action. He went to the movies for the first time at around thirteen, at
the Louis Theater at Thirty-fifth and Michigan, somehow persuading his
younger brother to accompany him. "I said, ‘You know Papa don't believe
in it.' He said, ‘Nobody gonna say anything, and you ain't gonna tell
anyone.' I said, ‘Noooo . . .' ‘Then how he gonna know?'
"After
that we went all the time — me and Sam had a ball. One time there was
no seats, and Sam called, ‘Fire!' Shit, they wanted to put our ass in
jail. But we got a seat. We used to get tripe sandwiches at this little
place on Thirty-sixth, they be all covered with onions and pickles, and
you get in the theater and just bite down on it, and everybody in the
show want to know, ‘Who got them tripe sandwiches?'"
Their
older sister Hattie still hadn't gone to the movies herself. "I wanted
to go so bad, but I was scared of a whipping. Everyone in our group was
going to the show, and I had to tell them I couldn't. They even offered
to pay for me, 'cause I was too embarrassed to say, ‘My daddy won't let
me.' But then I finally do go, and who do I see first thing in there?
Sam and L.C. And they said, ‘Girl, we was wondering when you was going
to wake up!'"
Sam, as L.C. saw it, "said just what he
thought, whether you liked it or not. If Sam thought something, he would
tell you, it didn't make no difference. One time we was going to the
movies at the Oakland, on Thirty-ninth and Drexel, and we stopped to get
some caramel corn. We come out of the store, and here are these three
fellows, and one of them says, ‘Hey, man, give me a quarter.' And Sam
just looks at him and says, ‘Hey, man, you too old to be out here
mooching. Why don't you get a job?' He say, ‘Hey, man, what you say?'
Well, Sam and I put our popcorn on the ground and get ready to fight.
But then one of the other boys say, ‘Hey, man, don't mess with them.
Don't you know they're Charlie Cook's brothers?' Said, ‘Charles'll come
down here and kill everybody.' So that's what made the boys back up. But
Sam didn't care. He said, ‘I got a quarter, and I'm going to the show
with my quarter. You need a job!'"
His imagination was
inflamed by the cowboys-and-Indians movies that ran at the Louis and at
the Oakland Theater, too, and when they got home, he and L.C. played at
all that "cowboy jazz," which, of course, inevitably led to yet another
brotherly fight. There was no question that Sam lived in the world as
much or more than any other member of his family: he was bright, he was
daring, he was driven by ambition. But at the same time, much of the
vision that fueled that ambition came from an interior view, a life of
the mind, that was very different from his brothers' and sisters', that
was almost entirely his own. Radio, like the movies, offered a vehicle
of escape; he was completely caught up in the comedies, dramas, and
ongoing serials. But books were his principal refuge from the humdrum
reality of everyday life. He and Hattie (and later Agnes) were the
readers in the family, each one taking out five books at a time, the
maximum you were allowed, from the Lincoln Library on Thirty-ninth. They
read everything — adventure books, mysteries, the classics (Sam's
favorite was Huckleberry Finn) — and they swapped the books around, so
that in one week, by Hattie's estimation, they might read as many as ten
books apiece. "I mean, the whole family read. We would take turns
reading tales out of different books, because our parents, even though
they didn't go far in school, really valued education. But Sam was
really a bookworm, he was a history buff, but he would read just about
anything."
He started high school at Wendell Phillips, just a
ten- or fifteen-minute walk from home, over on Pershing near the
library, in the fall of 1944. His big sister Mary had recently
graduated, Charles was entering his senior year, and Hattie was a
junior, but Sam, despite his slight stature and some initial reserve,
quickly made his mark. It was impossible, his classmates would later
acknowledge in the Phillipsite, the high school yearbook, to imagine Sam
Cook "not being able to make a person laugh." His teachers described
Sam as "personable and aggressive," which might charitably be taken as a
stab at summoning up something of his bubbling good nature, his vast
appreciation of life in all of its dimensions. But whatever his
schoolmates' or teachers' opinions of him, however much or however
little he may have impressed them, he was probably better known as big
Charlie Cook's brother than for any accomplishments of his own. And
although he sang in the glee club, where sufficient notice was taken of
him that he was given a solo at the Christmas show in his junior year,
few of his classmates seem even to have been aware of the existence of
the Singing Children, let alone their celebrity in certain circles.
He
took over his brother's job at the Blue Goose when Charles started
driving for a fruit-and-vegetable vendor. According to his little
sister, Agnes, "Sam always drew a crowd, the kids would go in the
grocery store just to talk to him." And he joined one of the local
"gangs," the Junior Destroyers — more like a teenage social club,
according to his brother L.C., which served as a badge of neighborhood
identification and mutual protection. "We had to belong to a club to go
to school," according to Sam, but he enjoyed the growing sense of
independence, the thrill of confrontation not infrequently followed by
unarmed combat, above all the camaraderie of belonging to a group that
was not defined by his father's church. Everyone's memories of Sam at
this time come back to his laugh, its warmth, its inclusiveness, the way
he would indicate, simply by timbre, that for him there was no such
thing as a private joke. There was another boy in the gang, Leroy
Hoskins, known to everyone as "Duck," whose laugh was so infectious that
Sam vowed he would one day capture it on record.
For all of
his social skills, he continued to insist on his own idiosyncratic way
of doing things, no matter how trivial, no matter how foolish this might
sometimes make him seem. Charles had by now started working the 3:45 to
11:45 P.M. shift out at Reynolds ("I lied about my age. I got the job
because I loved clothes; I was always the best dresser in the family"),
and L.C. was working as Charles' assistant on the fruit-and-vegetable
truck and pestering Charles to teach him to drive. "I was eleven, but
Charles taught me, put me on two telephone books in my daddy's car so I
could see. He was gonna teach Sam at the same time, but Sam said, ‘No,
man, I'll learn myself.' You couldn't tell Sam nothing — he had to do it
on his own. He tried to put the car in gear with his feet on the brakes
instead of the clutch, almost stripped the gears in my daddy's car.
Charles said, ‘Sam, you gonna strip the gears.' He said, ‘No, man, don't
disturb me now.' You know, sometimes I think he thought he was the
smartest person in the world."
The war impinged in various
ways. Most directly because Willie was in the Army Corps of Engineers
overseas — he was in one of the first units to cross the Rhine, and they
eagerly followed the news of his division's movements and looked
forward to his letters home. Sam and L.C. explored the city, roaming far
beyond the confines of the neighborhood, sometimes walking along the
lake all the way to the Loop and back, a distance of some three miles,
and observing a hub of activity, a sense of entitlement and economic
well-being, from which they knew black people were systematically
excluded. They read the Chicago Defender, too, the pioneering Chicago
journal that served as a kind of Negro national newspaper, and took a
job selling the weekend edition of the paper on the street every
Thursday night when it came out. Their growing interest in girls took
them to the skating rink up by the Regal Theater on Forty-seventh
Street, where all the big stars of the day appeared — but, true to the
strictures of their father, while they may have gazed longingly at the
marquee, they never ventured inside to see the show.
They
continued to sing every chance they got, going from apartment to
apartment in the Lenox Building, with Sam performing pop numbers by the
Ink Spots he had learned off the radio and L.C. taking care of the
business end. "Sam would do the singing. I just get the money."
The
Singing Children continued to perform all around town, wherever their
father was preaching or their manager could get them bookings. For all
of his reluctance, Charles was a more and more compelling performer who
was not about to be distracted from his song. One time when he was
little, L.C. watched in amazement as "this lady got happy and jumped up
and grabbed Charles — I mean, she was shaking and wiggling him all
around — but he never stopped singing. She wouldn't have had to shake me
but one time, brother, and I'd be gone, but Charles was bad." At the
same time, Sam's gift was increasingly apparent to Charles, who couldn't
help but recognize the gulf that existed between a God-given but
unwanted talent like his own and the wholehearted commitment that Sam
brought to his music. But each of the children, with the possible
exception of Hattie, was at this point disaffected in his or her own
way. Charles at eighteen couldn't wait to get out of the house and out
from under his father's rule. Mary, a year and a half older and working
at Reynolds now, too, was going with a young minister at Westpoint
Baptist across the street whom she would soon marry, and simply felt
that she was "too old to be getting up there singing": it was, in a
sense, embarrassing to her.
Even Sam seemed tired of living
so much in his father's shadow. "This Little Light of Mine" was the
Reverend Cook's favorite song, the one he would sing almost every Sunday
before he would preach, and one day, when he was around fifteen, Sam
announced, "Papa, I can beat you singing that song." Reverend Cook,
never one to take a challenge lying down, said, "Son, I beg to differ.
That's my song." But he agreed to let Sam test his theory.
When
Sunday came, Reverend Cook announced that his son was going to sing
with him, and Sam strode confidently to the pulpit in front of the whole
congregation. "All right, Papa," he said, "you start." No, Reverend
Cook replied, it was his song, and Sam could start. Then, just as Sam
got the people right where he wanted, his father held up a hand and
said, "Okay, boy, you can back up now." Bewildered, Sam said, "What you
talking about, Papa?" But his father just said, "You can stop singing,
it's my song, and it's time for me to sing." And so he did, according to
L.C. "Papa took that song, and he wore Sam out with it. Afterwards, Sam
said, ‘You know I was getting ready to turn it out.' And Papa said,
‘Yeah, you was getting ready, but I turned it out. Like I told you, it's
my song.' And Sam laughed and said, ‘Yeah, Papa, it's your song.'"
To
his brothers and sisters it was one more example of Sam's stubborn
belief in himself, perhaps the closest that any of them could come to
their father's sense of divine mission. And while they chuckled among
themselves on those rare occasions when Sam got his comeuppance, no one
ever thought to question his good intentions, merely his common sense.
The
one time they saw his confidence falter was when the whole family went
to hear the Soul Stirrers at a program at Christ Temple Cathedral, the
Church of Christ (Holiness)'s mother church at Forty-fourth and
Lawrence. It was the first time that any of the Singing Children had
seen the Stirrers in person, and they were expecting to get up and do a
number themselves. But when they heard R.H. Harris' soaring falsetto
lead, and upon its conclusion second lead James Medlock just matched him
note for note, they looked at one another with a combination of
astonishment and fear. "I mean, we thought we were bad," said L.C., "but
that was the greatest sound we ever heard in our lives." They were
mesmerized by the intricate patterns of the music, the way in which
Harris employed his patented "yodel" (a falsetto break that provided
dramatic counterpoint to the carefully worked-out harmonies of the
group), the way that he interjected his ad libs to visibly raise the
spirit of the congregation, then came down hard on the last bar of each
verse without ever losing the thread of the song. That baldheaded old
man just stood up there flat-footed and delivered his pure gospel
message, with the women falling out like the Singing Children had never
seen. After a couple of numbers, Sam shook his head sorrowfully and
turned to his younger brother. "Man, we ain't got no business being up
there today," he said. And though the others all tried to persuade him
otherwise, Sam remained resolute in his refusal to sing.
It
was during the war that they first heard their parents talking openly
about segregation, about what you could and couldn't do both inside and
outside the neighborhood. Their father was growing increasingly
impatient with the lack of visible racial progress, and he was beginning
to grow impatient with his own little ministry as well. More and more
he was drawn to the traveling evangelism with which he had started out
in Mississippi and which he had never entirely given up. "He was just
kind of a freelance fellow," Church of Christ (Holiness) bishop M.R.
Conic told writer David Tenenbaum, and soon Charles Cook started
traveling again in ever-widening circles, shifting his exclusive focus
away from his little flock. He thought he could do better for himself
and his family.
The Cooks by now had moved around the corner
to 724 East Thirty-sixth, and David, the baby of the family, who was
born in 1941, would never forget his fifteen-year-old brother Sam
getting in trouble with the neighbors, not long after they moved in,
when the couple downstairs became involved in a noisy altercation. "We
was all up there having fun, and [heard] this commotion on the floor
below, so Sam goes out and leans over the bannister and calls out,
‘What's all this noise out here?' The guy shot upstairs — I mean, he was
serious — but we all went back inside, and Sam said, ‘Well, that's all
right, he won't make any more noise.'"
With the war over,
Willie went back to work at the chicken market, Mary settled into
married life, and Charles enlisted in the air force at the age of
nineteen. He was stationed in Columbus, Ohio, and despite his unwavering
determination to quit singing altogether the moment he turned
twenty-one, he joined a chorus that traveled widely with a service show
called Operation Happiness.
But that was the end of the
Singing Children, and the extension of another phase of Sam's singing
career. Just as he and L.C. had gone from apartment to apartment in the
Lenox Building, serenading the various tenants with one of the Ink
Spots' recent hits, they had begun in the last year or so to greet
passengers alighting from the streetcar at Thirty-fifth and Cottage
Grove, the end of the line, in similar fashion. Sam's specialties
continued for the most part to derive from the sweet-voiced falsetto
crooning of Bill Kenny, the breathy lead tenor for the group that had
dominated black secular quartet singing (and in the process enjoyed a
remarkable string of number-one pop hits) for the last seven years.
Among Sam's favorites were Kenny's original 1939 signature tune, "If I
Didn't Care," the group's almost equally influential "I Don't Want to
Set the World On Fire," and their latest, one of 1946's biggest hits,
"To Each His Own." As in the apartment building, Sam would sing, and
L.C. would pass the hat. "People would stop because Sam had this voice.
It seemed like he just drew people to him — he sang the hell out of
‘South of the Border.' The girls would stop, and they would give me
dimes, quarters, and dollars. Man, we was cleaning up."
Sam
and L.C. harmonized with other kids from the neighborhood, too ("You
know, everybody in the neighborhood could sing"). They sang at every
available opportunity — Johnny Carter (later lead singer with the
Flamingos and Dells), James "Dimples" Cochran of the future Spaniels,
Herman Mitchell, Johnny Keyes, every one of them doing their best in any
number of interchangeable combinations to mimic Ink Spots harmonies,
"singing around [different] places," as Sam would later recall, just to
have fun.
His mind was never far from music; one day, he
told L.C., he would rival Nat "King" Cole, another Chicago minister's
son, whose first number-one pop hit, "(I Love You) For Sentimental
Reasons," was one of Sam's recent favorites. But somehow he never seemed
to contemplate the idea that he might have to leave the gospel field to
do it. Nor did he allow the music to distract him from his main task of
the moment, which was to finish high school. Reverend and Mrs. Cook
were determined that each of their children would graduate from Wendell
Phillips — and it seemed as if L.C. was the only one likely to provide
them with a real challenge ("Everybody else liked school; I didn't").
Sam saw education as a way to expand what he understood to be an
otherwise narrow and parochial worldview. Reading took him places he
couldn't go — but places he expected one day to discover for himself. He
was constantly drawing, caught up in his studies of architectural
drafting at school but just as quick to sketch anything that caught his
interest — he did portraits of his family and friends, sketches to
entertain his little brother David. In the absence of inherited wealth,
he placed his faith in his talent and his powers of observation, and
despite an almost willful blindness to his own eccentricities, he was a
keen student of human nature. Which was perhaps the key to his success
with girls, as his brother L.C. saw it, and the key to his almost
instant appeal to friend and stranger, young and old alike.
His
father had full faith in all his children, but perhaps most of all in
his middle son. He was focused in a way that none of the others, for all
of their obvious intelligence, ambition, and good character, appeared
to be — and Reverend Cook had confidence that neither Sam's
mischievousness nor his imagination would distract him from his mission.
It was Sam's mark to sing, as his father was well aware. "He didn't
bother about playing ball, nothing like that. He would just gather
himself on the steps of buildings and sing."
It was a gift
of God, manifest from when he was a baby, and the only question in
Charles Cook's mind was not whether he would achieve his ambition but
how.
Then one day in the spring of 1947, two teenage
brothers, Lee and Jake Richards, members of a fledgling gospel quartet
that so far had failed to come up with a name for itself, ran across Sam
singing "If I Didn't Care" to a girl in the hallway of a building at
Thirty-sixth and Rhodes. He was singing so pretty that Lee and his
brother started harmonizing behind him, and it came out so good that
they asked him who he was singing with. "I don't sing with nobody," Sam
told them, and they brought him back to the apartment building where
they lived on the third floor, at 466 East Thirty-fifth, just a block
away, and where Mr. Copeland, the man who was training them, and the
father of their fourteen-year-old baritone singer, Bubba, had the
apartment at the back.
Everybody in Martoni’s Italian restaurant had their eye on Sam Cooke.
In his Sy Devore suit, the 33-year-old R&B singer cut a dashing
figure. With his recent Live at the Copa album climbing the
charts, Sam was on the brink of stepping up to the big leagues, a
crossover figure on par with Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr.
He was having dinner with producer Al Schmitt and Schmitt’s wife,
Joan. Well-wishers kept stopping by the table, interrupting their
conversation. Sam, who’d already had three or four martinis, eventually
got pulled away to the bar.
When their orders arrived, Al Schmitt went to get Sam and found him
laughing it up with a group of friends and music business associates.
Sam was buying, and he flashed a wad of bills, what looked like
thousands of dollars. He told Al that he and his wife should go ahead
with their meal.
At a booth near the bar, there was a baby-faced 22-year-old Asian
girl, sitting with three guys. Sam caught her eye. He’d seen her around.
One of the guys, a guitar player Sam knew, introduced them. The girl’s
name was Elisa Boyer. Before long, the pair were cozied up in a booth.
They left Martoni’s around 1 a.m. in Sam’s brand new red Ferrari and
headed to a nightclub called PJ’s, where they were going to meet the
Schmitts. By the time they arrived, the Schmitts were gone. In the club,
Sam got into a heated argument with some guy who was hitting on Boyer.
She asked Sam to take her home, and they left at 2 a.m.
According to Boyer, Sam raced down Santa Monica, and against her
protests, pulled onto the freeway. She later told police that she asked
again to be taken home, but Sam said, “Don’t worry now. I just want to
go for a little ride.” He stroked her hair and told her how pretty she
was.
They
exited the highway at Figueroa Street, near LAX. Boyer asked again to
be taken home, but Sam drove straight to the Hacienda Motel. He got out
of the car and walked up to a glass partition at the manager’s office
while Boyer remained in the car. He registered under his own name with
the clerk, Bertha Franklin. Franklin eyed Boyer in the car, and told Sam
that he’d have to sign in as Mr. and Mrs.
Sam drove around to the back of the motel. Boyer claimed he then
dragged her into the room, pinned her on the bed and started to tear her
clothes off. “I knew he was going to rape me,” she told the police. She
went into the bathroom and tried to lock the door, but the latch was
broken. She tried the window but it was painted shut. When she came out,
Sam was already undressed. He groped her, then went into the bathroom
himself. Boyer, wearing a slip and a bra, picked up her clothes and
fled.
Franklin after shooting Cooke
The first thing she said she did was pound on the night manager’s
door. Franklin didn’t answer. Boyer ran half a block, dumped her clothes
on the ground and got dressed. Tangled among her clothes were Sam’s
shirt and pants. She left them on the ground, found a phone booth and
called the police.
Meanwhile, Sam, wearing one shoe and a sports jacket, had come out of
the room, frantically looking for Boyer. He drove the Ferrari back to
the manager’s office, and banged on the door of Franklin’s office. “Is
the girl in there?” he yelled. According to Franklin, when she said no,
Sam began to work at the locked door and ram it with his shoulder. The
frame ripped loose and the latch gave. Sam charged in, looking around
for Boyer. He grabbed Franklin’s wrist. “Where is the girl?” They got
into a tussle.
Franklin, though shorter than Sam, outweighed him by about 30 pounds.
She told the police, “He fell on top of me … I tried to bite him
through that jacket: biting, scratching and everything. Finally, I got
up, when I kicked him … I run and grabbed the pistol off the TV, and I
shot … at close range … three times.”
Two of the bullets missed. But the third entered his left side,
passed through his left lung, his heart and his right lung. Sam fell
back and in astonishment, said what would be his last words: “Lady, you
shot me.”
Franklin claims that he got up again and ran at her. She hit him over
the head with a broom handle. This time, he stayed down. When the
police arrived, Sam Cooke was dead.
At 6 a.m., Sam’s widow Barbara greeted the news with hysterics,
trying to shield their two young children from reporters and fans who
were gathering at their house.
Elisa Boyer testifying during the coroner’s inquest, Dec. 16, 1964
Five days later, at the coroner’s inquest, Boyer and Franklin
recounted their stories in a hasty proceeding that barely allowed Sam’s
lawyer one question. Tests showed that at the time of death, Sam had a
blood alcohol level of .16 (.08 is considered too drunk to drive). Sam’s
credit cards were missing, but a money clip with $108 was in his jacket
pocket. The shooting was ruled “justifiable homicide.” Case closed.
There are many problems here. Let’s start with Elisa Boyer. She
testified that she met Sam at a “Hollywood dinner party” and that he
sang a song at the party. No mention of Martoni’s or PJ’s. She said she
was “kidnapped” by Sam and couldn’t escape because his car was going too
fast. Yet when Sam went to the motel window to register, Boyer was left
alone in the car. She could’ve escaped or yelled for help. Moreover, if
it was Sam’s intention to rape Boyer, why would he have registered
under his real name? Boyer said she mistakenly took Sam’s clothes from
the room when she grabbed her own. Wouldn’t it make sense that she was
merely trying to prevent his pursuit? And what about the wad of cash
that she spied earlier in the night? Surely she knew right where it was.
The truth about Boyer came out a month later when she was arrested in
Hollywood for prostitution. The Hacienda Motel, which offered
$3-per-hour rates, was known as a hangout for hookers. What probably
happened is that Sam paid for Boyer’s services, and when he stepped into
the bathroom, she ran out with his cash and credit cards. In 1979,
Boyer was found guilty of second-degree murder in the death of a
boyfriend.
Cooke’s body carried out of motel
Bertha Franklin, an ex-madam with her own criminal record, was forced
to quit her job after receiving several death threats. She filed a
$200,000 lawsuit against Sam Cooke’s estate for punitive damages and
injuries, but lost.
As for Barbara Cooke, her husband’s infidelity was nothing new to
her. But she also had some action going on the side with a local
bartender. On the day of Sam’s funeral, this guy was seen wearing Sam’s
watch and his ring. Two months after Sam’s death, Barbara had dumped the
bartender and married Sam’s friend and back-up singer Bobby Womack.
For Sam’s part, he was always a womanizer. As his friend Bumps
Blackwell once said, “Sam would walk past a good girl to get to a
whore.” There were all kinds of theories around his death—a drug deal
involving someone close to Sam in which Sam tried to intervene, a Mafia
hit, a set-up devised by a jealous Barbara Cooke. Many believed it was a
racist plot in the entertainment business. As with any rising star (not
to mention one of color in the early 1960s), Sam had made some enemies.
As one woman friend of his said, “He was just getting too big for his
britches for a suntanned man.”
Was Sam Cooke lured into a trap at the Hacienda Motel? Were Elisa
Boyer and Bertha Franklin working in tandem? Was Barbara Cooke involved
somehow? Or was it all just a tragic accident? Over the years, various
investigators have made noises about reopening the case, but with most
of the principle players dead and gone, it seems unlikely it will ever
be solved.
Sam
Cooke was a trailblazing recording artist who helped shape the soul and
pop scene with hits like "You Send Me," "Chain Gang" and "Sad Mood."
Synopsis
Born
on January 22, 1931, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Sam Cooke sang with
the gospel group the Soul Stirrers before going on to land huge hits
like "You Send Me," "Wonderful World," "Chain Gang" and "Twistin' the
Night Away." Forging a link between soul and pop, he had a diverse
repertoire that attracted both black and white audiences, and started
his own record label and publishing company. Cooke died on December 11,
1964, in Los Angeles, California.
Early Life
Sometimes
called the father of soul music, singer Sam Cooke first reached the top
of the charts in 1957 with "You Send Me." A string of pop and R&B
hits soon followed, but he actually started out as a gospel performer.
Born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he grew up in Chicago as
the son of a minister.
Cooke began performing with his family as a
child. In his teens, he formed a quintet called the Highway QCs. Cooke
modeled his early work after one of his greatest inspirations, the Soul
Stirrers, a popular gospel group. Not long after graduating from high
school in 1948, he got the chance of a lifetime: being asked to join the
Soul Stirrers, which provided him with an opportunity to hone his
craft.
Career Highlights
After
six years with the Soul Stirrers, Cooke began to branch out into
secular music. He recorded his first single, 1957's "Lovable," under the
pseudonym "Dale Cooke." Later that year, Cooke released his first
number one hit, "You Send Me." Music fans loved this ballad so much that
it toppled Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock" from the top of the charts. Before
long he put his crystal-clear, velvet-smooth voice to work on such
up-tempo tunes as "Only Sixteen" and "Everybody Loves To Cha Cha Cha."
In
addition to being a talented singer and songwriter, Cooke had business
smarts. He established his own publishing company for his music in 1959
and negotiated an impressive contract with RCA in 1960. Not only did he
get a substantial advance, but Cooke would also get ownership of his
master recordings after 30 years. Getting this was a remarkable feat for
any recording artist at the time. He continued to be a pioneer behind
the scenes, founding his own record label in the early 1960s. Working
with other artists on his label, Cooke helped develop the careers of
Bobby Womack and Billy Preston, among others.
More hits followed
Cooke's move to RCA, including 1960's "Chain Gang." Behind the song's
catchy rhythm mimicking the sound of prisoners breaking rocks, the song
also served as a social commentary by Cooke. He continued to win over
fans with a variety of musical styles, from the 1960 ballad "Wonderful
World" to the 1962 dance track "Twistin' the Night Away." In 1963, Cooke
once again charted with his ode to loneliness, "Another Saturday
Night."
Tragic Death and Legacy
No
one knows for certain what exactly happened in the early hours of
December 11, 1964. Cooke had been out the night before, reportedly
drinking at a Los Angeles bar where he met a woman named Elisa Boyer.
The pair hit it off and eventually ended up at the Hacienda Motel. There
the couple had some type of altercation in their room, and Cooke then
ended up in the motel's office. He reportedly clashed with the motel's
manager, and the manager shot Cooke. Cooke died from his injury, which
the manager claimed was inflicted in self-defense. It was later ruled
justifiable homicide.
Thousands turned out to mourn the legendary
singer. Ray Charles and Lou Rawls sang at his funeral in Los Angeles,
and another service was held in his former hometown, Chicago. The year
after his death, Cooke's record company released his song "A Change Is
Gonna Come." He wrote this civil rights anthem in response to Bob
Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." It was perhaps his most pointedly
political song.
No matter the circumstances of his passing, Cooke
left behind a tremendous musical legacy. It only takes a listen to
recordings of his live shows, such as his 1963 performance at Miami's
Harlem Square Club, to recognize his contributions to soul music. And as
a pop icon, Cooke has endured through his songs. Otis Redding and Al
Green are among the artists who have covered his work. He was inducted
into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame in 1986. http://www.atlanticcityweekly.com/news_and_views/salute-to-mr-soul-sam-cooke/article_4d6d12e5-e460-55dc-b49b-80f637e52062.html
Salute to Mr. Soul, Sam Cooke.
Celebrating what would have been music legend Sam Cooke's 80th birthday – from an Atlantic City perspective.
by Jeff Schwachter
NOTE: SEE WEB EXTRA "Sam Cooke & Bob Dylan: A 'Change' in the 'Wind' AT THE END OF THIS STORY (Page 2). SEE PHOTO GALLERY HERE. Also, see sources, references and thank yous on this related blog post.
At
right is video from last year's "Club Harlem" exhibit, featrung Ralph
Hunter, of the African-American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey,
as well as interviews with decendants of the former owners of Club
Harlem.
A banner with the name Slappy White on it hung across Kentucky Avenue all summer.
The late comedian and actor (who died in Brigantine in
1995) was booked for the entire season at Atlantic City’s famed Club
Harlem. On this particular summer night, however — July 24, 1964, to be
precise — hanging above the banner was yet another banner. It read: “Sam
Cooke.”
(LEFT: Photo courtesy of Atlantic City Free Public Library) The
33-year-old soul pioneer, who was on the verge of cementing his place
as one of the greatest entertainers in the world at the time, was booked
at the club from July 23 to Aug. 5. It was his second consecutive
summer at the club.
After years of enormous recording success with
songs he had written, recorded and performed around the world,
now-classics such as the monumental hits “You Send Me,” “Cupid,”
“Wonderful World,” “Twistin’ the Night Away” and “Chain Gang,” to name
but a mere few, Cooke was invigorated by the rise of the Civil Rights
movement at the time, and had penned what would become the movement’s
anthem following his death, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” just months
before.
Sadly, Cooke wouldn’t live to see the end of the year – one of his most accomplished and prolific.
The
line of patrons waiting to get inside Club Harlem on this Friday night —
a well-dressed crowd of both blacks and whites — stretched south down
Kentucky Avenue towards Atlantic. Across the street, as on most summer
nights, there was also a line waiting to get inside Grace’s Little Belmont, a lounge where Sammy Davis Jr.’s mother tended the bar. Davis was slated to appear at Club Harlem a few weeks after Cooke.
Cars and taxis whizzed by dropping off club-goers.
Elsewhere
in the city, Ramsey Lewis was at the Wonder Gardens, the Cole Bros.
were at The Gables, and, direct from Puerto Rico, Diablito and the
Davalos Orchestra was booked at the Around-The-World Room on Albany
Avenue. The Steel Pier was advertising the Beatles “sharing their first
full-length hilarious action-packed film” on Aug. 5.
Like several night spots in Atlantic City at the time, Club Harlem offered an assortment of entertainment
with summer-long acts that year such as Larry Steele’s revue “Smart
Affairs of 1965,” which the headline act that week would essentially
star in; the “Larry Steele Girls,” a group of gorgeous young dancers
that worked seven days a week during the summer, usually until the next
morning; Slappy White as emcee; and Johnny Lynch and his Orchestra.
Club Harlem
actually housed two showrooms — one up front, the cocktail lounge,
where Chris Columbo led the house band behind Willis “Gator Tail”
Jackson on this July night, and the main showroom in the back where
patrons paid a cover fee to see the headlining acts.
A week of shows went by before Atlantic City Press
columnist Ted Schall offered a review of the scene happening over at
Club Harlem in the July 29, 1964 edition. The tiny piece, entitled
“Harlem Hit,” reads: “Larry Steele has mixed, blended and baked an
entertainment-rich cake which he serves with a flourish at the Club
Harlem in his ‘Smart Affairs of 1965’ [show]. Recording star Sam Cooke
provides a delectable and flavorful icing. Ingredients follow a recipe
of fast-faster-and torrid for the hard-working, well-drilled line of
girls and boys dance and cavort about the Harlem stage with unbelievable
energy.” Schall adds that the “lovely statuesque show girls add
interest in the glamour department, helping to pace the show between
solo spots.”
The columnist singled out show girl Patti Harris for
her “dancing segment” during a “Caribbean spectacular,” and a few other
acts and ended with: “Topping the bill is recording star Sam Cooke, who
is at home in any mode [and] has the happy faculty of sweeping his
audience with him into whatever mood his song dictates and during most
of the stint, the mallets provided at the Harlem’s tables beat out a
rhythmic accompaniment to his vocalizing.”
Cooke appeared at Club
Harlem with a band that included bongos, guitar and bass guitar (one of
which was played by Bobby Womack, likely the bass, according to Cooke’s
award-winning biographer and music writer Peter Guralnick), with Lynch’s
band filling in the holes for Cooke’s set.
At the time, Cooke,
who would have been 80 on Jan. 22, 2011, was at the height of his
career. Nobody in the Club Harlem audience that summer would have
guessed that he was only months away from his tragic, early death.
A
gospel sensation as a young man growing up in Chicago before venturing
into the world of mid-1950s pop music, where he had unmatched success —
and respect — as a black recording artist at the time, Cooke, according
to Guralnick’s 2005 biography, the New York Times Notable Book of the
Year, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, was a complex man.
Known
for his majestic, almost angelic voice, which never hit a bad note,
Cooke was “one of the most phenomenal successes in the history of show
business,” at the time, as the Press described him in a July
30, 1964 profile and interview with the singer. He was not only a
pioneer in the realm of soul music — he essentially created it — but a
visionary who, by the time of his death on Dec. 11, 1964, had started
his own publishing and recording companies, realizing the importance of
owning his own songs. It was something that was very rare in 1964,
especially for a black artist.
Months before the Club Harlem
shows, in January 1964 Cooke, an avid reader of James Baldwin and other
modern voices of the time, according to Guralnick, recorded a song that
he had just written at the end of 1963. It would become one of his most
popular songs, even though he rarely performed it live.
Inspired by and in response to the “protest singers” of the early 1960s and the whole Hootenanny scene, Cooke penned “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He performed the song on the Tonight Show
in February 1964, and according to Guralnick, who describes the events
during the show taping in spectacular detail in his book, it was a
milestone for Cooke, his bandmates, his friends, his manager at the time
Allen Klein, and for America.
The larger role that Sam Cooke
played in the Civil Rights movement of the mid-to-late 1960s, Guralnick
says during a recent phone interview for Atlantic City Weekly,
“was in writing a song that became the theme song for the Civil Rights
movement, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’ which has persisted to this day as
an emblem of change and as a ... symbol of the movement as it’s
continued.”
The single was never released during Cooke’s lifetime,
but it was no secret that during his last two years alive he was
becoming increasingly aware and responsive with regard to America’s
Civil Rights movement and the segregation and racism that perpetuated
it. In the autumn of 1963, Cooke was arrested in Shreveport, La., after
refusing to leave a “brand-new Holiday Inn,” when the “man at the desk”
said there were “no vacancies,” even though Cooke had called earlier and
made reservations for he and his wife Barbara, according to Guralnick’s
book.
Following the historic March on Washington on Aug. 28,
1963, featuring Martin Luther King Jr., as well as a host of musicians,
Cooke was given a copy of the new Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album and was blown away by Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
As Guralnick writes in Dream Boogie:
“He was so carried away with the message [of the song], and the fact
that a white boy had written it, that he [said] he was almost ashamed
not to have written something like that himself. It wasn’t the way Dylan
sang, he told Bobby Womack. It was what he had to say.”
Prior to
his Atlantic City engagement, Cooke made a triumphant return to New
York’s Copacabana. According to Guralnick, Cooke’s stint there in the
late 1950s was poorly received and the feeling stuck with Cooke until he
put “the crowd away” at the venue upon his 1964 return.
Working
out the Copa show for a while with Sammy Davis Jr.’s arranger, Cooke and
his partners cooked up a show that still sounds amazing 47 years after
it was recorded for the 1965 Sam Cooke at the Copa (RCA) album.
On
the record, which is among four Cooke albums that are currently being
offered in high-resolution digital audio files via an agreement between
ABKCO Records and HDTracks — the others are Keep Movin’ On, Ain’t That Good News, and the career retrospective (that includes the hard to find recording of “A Change Is Gonna Come”) Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964 — Cooke performs both “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “If I Had a Hammer,” among his hits new and old.
A couple weeks later he would start his Summer 1964 residency at Club Harlem.
Guralnick
says he doubts very much that Cooke would have played the same set that
he performed at the Copacabana while in Atlantic City. The author says
the same about Cooke’s Club Harlem stint the summer beforehand — when he
was booked July 11-17 — in relation to his now-famous 1963 “chitlin
circuit” gig at the Harlem Square Club in Miami, Fla. The gig was
captured and released on the 1985 album Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963: One Night Stand,
which captures “a harder, grittier version of the Sam Cooke that [was]
known from his records,” as Guralnick writes in the original liner notes
for the album.
“The thing is,” says Guralnick, “is that the
Harlem Square [recording] was at the beginning of 1963 and he had
brought a completely revamped show into the Harlem Square after touring
England with Little Richard and just seeing the energy that Little
Richard put into his show and the way that Little Richard just commanded
attention and took over the audience. So Sam and his business partner
J.W. Alexander flew home from England, went to California, worked out a
show, which is essentially what the show at the Harlem Square is. And
they had debuted it at the Apollo [in Harlem] in [late] 1962. I would
doubt very much that he did that exact show at the Club Harlem [during
his engagement there in 1963 from July 11-17]. From what I understand
the Club Harlem was much more of an uptown [club], what we think of as a
Las Vegas show. So it would surprise me if Sam had the identical show
to what he was doing at the Harlem Square at the Club Harlem.”
With
regard to the summer of ‘64 Copa show and Cooke’s stint at Club Harlem a
few weeks later, Guralnick adds, “The show he did at the Copa was
completely different from any show he had done before. ... You know,
fully orchestrated and there was a lot of trauma putting that together,
which is in the book, but the thing is he went almost immediately
following the Copa to Club Harlem. And the interesting thing is that
[his manager] Allen Klein ... was responsible for getting him back into
the Copa — it was Sam’s long-held dream to return to the Copa and
triumph. And Allen, who had recently become his manager, supported [his
return to the Copa] all the way. ... But Allen went to see Sam at Club
Harlem and said the show at Club Harlem was way beyond the Copa show. As
much as the Copa show was hailed [Cooke went] way beyond it in energy
and connection with the audience.”
The repertoire may have been
similar, adds Guralnick, although not identical. “I would guess that Sam
would’ve put more of an emphasis on songs like ‘Bring it on Home to Me’
or ‘Chain Gang’ [at Club Harlem],” he says. “I’m sure he would’ve
[sung] a lot of those same songs [but] considerably more down home and
considerably more soulful
Cooke
was no stranger to the Jersey Shore, having worked joints down in
Wildwood as far back as 1958. Guralnick’s book notes that he played the
Hurricane Room in Wildwood the same summer he debuted at Club Harlem.
It
was during that first Club Harlem stint that he fell for one of Larry
Steele’s dancers, a gorgeous young woman named Betty Jo Spyropulos.
“He tried to flirt with me in 1963, but I had a boyfriend that summer,” Spyropulos tells Atlantic City Weekly
during a recent phone interview from her Long Island home. “In 1964 I
was supposed to have that same boyfriend, but it [didn’t work out,] so
Sam and I got pretty close that summer.”
Patti Harris, now an
Atlantic City icon, veteran dancer, educator, artist and visionary, was a
young (and also gorgeous) dancer at Club Harlem in the early 1960s. By
1964 Steele had her name advertised as one of the dancers to catch at
his club.
Although Harris, a dancer and instructor still based in
Atlantic City, doesn’t remember too much about appearing in the show
with Cooke, she does remember that the superstar had bought a dog for
one of the other dancers while he appeared at the club in 1964.
Yvonne Walton concurs.
Walton
was going to school at Morgan State in 1964. That summer she was
brought to Atlantic City to perform in a dance production for which she
was never paid. “I needed to find work to pay for the apartment I was
renting in Atlantic City that summer,” she tells Atlantic City Weekly.
First hired as a cigarette girl, Walton too became one of the Club Harlem show girls.
Once
the dancers in Larry Steele’s dance production, who would open all the
headliner bills and then be asked by management to sit at the bar so
that men could buy them drinks all night and boost the booze revenue,
told Steele that the cigarette girl Walton could dance, she was hired
instantly and would go on to dance at Club Harlem every summer through
her college years.
“The main show in the back room would start at
8pm,” recalls Walton, who now resides in Atco, N.J. “We [Larry Steele’s
dancers] would open every show. We’d work seven nights a week, including
the Breakfast shows [6am every Sunday morning] on the weekend.
“You had to dance or participate in every show. You didn’t have a choice.”
Walton
didn’t drink and says that she never liked to be touched or “have a
strange man put his arm around my shoulder.” So, instead of sitting
pretty at the bar with the rest of the dancers following the end of the
show, she would quietly sneak upstairs and hide in the dressing room to
read a book.
The back room — the main room — in Club Harlem could
hold a couple hundred patrons, recalls Walton. In 1964 when Cooke was in
town, the house was always packed, she says.
“We enjoyed working
with him very much,” says Walton. “He was such a nice person, you know?
Really, really nice and very friendly with everybody. We all took
pictures with him. I had my roommate from college come down and my mom
came down. They were so excited. He even took a picture with me.”
Walton remembers that “his manager,” Klein, took some of the dancers out to dinner at a “nice restaurant.”
“And
[Cooke] would always say, ‘Hi girls, how you doing?’ He was very
gregarious, just a really nice person. He never got out of [line.]”
Like Harris, Walton remembers Cooke buying a little dog for one of the dancers.
“I
think Betty Jo had a closer relationship with Sam,” says Walton. “She
was just so pretty; all the entertainers at the club were crazy about
her. And she was so personable and nice.” Betty Jo Spyropulos grew
up in Indiana, where a producer caught wind of her talent and put her
in a production that wound up traveling to Michigan. The show included
the Four Tops, Jackie Wilson and other luminaries. She came to
Atlantic City in 1960 to work with Larry Steele and spent five years
working the summer season (June to Labor day) at Club Harlem. She says
she struck up a close relationship with Cooke during that summer of 1964
residency.
The dancers in Larry Steele’s annual revue arrived in
the resort in early June and then rehearsed for three weeks until the
show opened at Club Harlem in late June, running through Labor Day. The
dancers worked seven nights a week until 6am, including Sunday’s
legendary 6am “Breakfast Show,” which would attract all of the
entertainers in town that weekend.
“He bought me a Yorkshire
Terrier, which we named Cookie and I remember driving up to New York
City from Atlantic City in a Rolls Royce that Allen Klein gave Sam for
the Copa gig [pictured on page 577 of Dream Boogie] because Sam had a photo shoot or something. “I
was about 24 years old, and had worked with many stars at the club by
that time, and I wasn’t really impressed with his Rolls Royce and things
like that. I remember he had a blank check to get whatever we wanted
and I went to buy the dog with Sam’s driver — I forget his name — after
we dropped him off at the photo shoot in New York.”
According to
Guralnick, this would not have been a rare thing for Cooke to have
“girls” in the many cities he performed. “Sam and his wife Barbara had a
pretty open marriage,” he says.
Spyropulos remembers that she and
the driver picked up Cooke after getting the dog “for about $150.” They
named the dog Lady Cookie Harlem the II, of New York.
“That was the name. It was registered with the Kennel Club,” Spyropulos recalls.
Spyropulos tells Atlantic City Weekly
that she doesn’t believe that what has been the long-time story of
Cooke’s death — which a jury declared a “justifiable homicide” in the
official court case — is the real story behind the entertainer’s murder.
“When
I went to the wake in Chicago, and I got to see Sam through his
glass-top coffin, one of his cousins was there and he told me that the
story of Cooke’s death was false and that he’d been dead for a longer
time than what was believed,” says Spyropulos.
To this day she
doesn’t think that Cooke could have been killed by a $3-a-night
California motel manager (Bertha Lee Franklin) because the two, as
accused, got into a very violent altercation.
“I have so many good
memories of Sam,” says Spyropulos. “And I always defend him because of
how his death was reported. He was always a gentleman and so clean cut.”
Although
she spent a lot time with Cooke where he was staying in Atlantic City
that summer, Spyropulos doesn’t remember where in the resort it was. She
does remember going to some off-the-beaten path after-hours joint that
Cooke knew of, to get breakfast.
“I had been working in Atlantic
City for several summers and thought I knew of all the places to go but
Sam, one time, took me to this place to have breakfast. It was an
after-hours place, but it was like at somebody’s house.”
Spyropulos
says that, sensing that the superstar was interested in her, she used
to always pop in to Cooke’s dressing room between sets to let him know
she’d be at the bar. The dancers were not permitted to leave the
premises of the club.
“Five minutes later, he’d just appear right next to me at
the bar,” says Spyropulos. “I saw that he had a liking for me so I would
do it all week. We never got to talk much at the bar though, because
there were so many people trying to talk to Sam. People would just come
out of nowhere.”
Spyropulos also remembers the night Cooke’s wife Barbara came to see the show.
“His
wife came to one of the ‘64 shows,” says Spyropulos. “And before that I
would always wait in the wings of the stage and hold a towel for him.
But the night his wife was there I didn’t do it because I didn’t think
it was right. And he came running from the stage all the way upstairs to
the dressing room, put the towel in my hand, and led me back down to
the stage.”
There were two headliner shows a night at Club Harlem. One started at 10:30pm and one at 1:30am.
Nearby a BBQ joint called Sapp’s was busy, as was the club across the street, Grace’s Little Belmont.
“Pop
Williams [who was an owner of Club Harlem] didn’t want us to go to the
other bars,” recalls Walton. “One time, my mom was in town and we went
over to the Little Belmont. And later Pop said, ‘You know you’re not
supposed to be doing that.’ And he was serious.”
The businessman wanted to keep all the money on his side of Kentucky Avenue.
And
on most nights during the summer season the avenue (dubbed “KY &
the Curb”) was packed with party seekers of all stripes. Blacks, whites,
men, women, all stood in line wearing their suits, ties, heels and
stockings.
“The whole street was filled with people all night
long,” remembers Walton. “People and all the entertainers in town would
all come down and just have a good time. Kentucky Avenue was the place
to go in A.C. Nobody was afraid of anybody hurting them or harming them.
It was like New York City.”
The action, says Walton, went all
night long at the club, and nearly every entertainer who came to town
“had to make it over to Club Harlem” at some point.
Atlantic City
historian Vicki Gold-Levi has the banner that hung across Kentucky
Avenue with Sam Cooke’s name on it (“It’s more like a canvas material
than a regular banner,” she says) and she is in the process of donating
it to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which
is being developed by the Smithsonian to be built on the Mall in
Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, Cooke, whose “brilliant smile ... could disarm both knaves and kings,” as Guralnick writes in Dream Boogie, lives on in his music, his extraordinary life story, and in the memories of those who were close to him.
Cooke
didn’t live to see the genre of music he had given birth to — inspiring
Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Al Green, Joe Tex and countless other
African-American singers who had strong gospel-singing backgrounds, were
well-versed in the blues and R&B, and who would forge the path of
soul music in the country for decades to come — but it’s nice to think
that he may have been staring down from heaven smiling on that cold
November 2007 night in Chicago when President-elect Barack Obama
referred to his song “A Change Is Gonna Come” during his acceptance
speech at Grant Park.
First, a blog post thanking sources, references and further reading and listening materials. Click here to read it. Second, the following list...
Sam Cooke & Bob Dylan: A 'Change' in the 'Wind'
Many
writers and critics have noted (with their pens) that Sam Cooke was
inspired to write his 1964 song "A Change Is Gonna Come" after hearing
Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," recorded in 1963.
As both songs
would become meshed with the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1960s,
and to this day remain symbolic of the "protest era," both Cooke and
Dylan would become "voices" for their respective generations and
audiences. While both songs have been performed and recorded by
countless artists around the globe, more recent, in 2007 Cooke's
"Change" was referenced by Barack Obama after he won the U.S.
presidential election and told the tens of thousands gathered at
Chicago's Grant Park on that cold November night that, "It's been a long
time coming, but tonight, change has come to America." (Bettye LaVette
and Jon Bon Jovi did a duet on the song for the We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial program.)
Even
including "Blowin' in the Wind" in his repertoire during what would be
his final years of performing— Cooke sings it on his posthumous 1965
album (recorded in the summer of 1964) Live at the Copa — it
has been said that Cooke admired Dylan's song so much that he was moved
to pen one of his greatest songs, "A Change Is Gonna Come" — the title
of which gives a tip of the cap to another Dylan song of the era "The
Times They Are A-Changin'" — which would, following Cooke's murder in
December 1964, become one of the most important songs of the Civil
Rights movement. Here, read more about the relationship between "Wind" and "Change" and find out about other Dylan-Cooke connections:
1. In Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Singers of All Time," Bono pays tribute to number seven on the list, Bob Dylan, with a Sam Cooke story:
"Bob
Dylan did what very, very few singers ever do. He changed popular
singing. And we have been living in a world shaped by Dylan's singing
ever since. Almost no one sings like Elvis Presley anymore. Hundreds try
to sing like Dylan. When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby
Womack, Womack said he didn't understand it. Cooke explained that from
now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth."
2. Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan,
Season One, Episode 31, "Tennessee" theme, which originally aired on XM
radio on Nov. 29, 2006 featured Sam Cooke's version of the song
"Tennessee Waltz" among Dylan's eclectic playlist.
3. Bob Dylan
and his band performed what would become Cooke's most inspiring and
popular songs following his early death, "A Change Is Gonna Come," at
the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, for the eventual TV special Apollo At 70: A Hot Night In Harlem.
Celebrating the theater's 70th anniversary, the show aired on NBC on
June 19, 2004. Watch Ossie Davis talk about Cooke and introduce Dylan at
the show, followed by Dylan's performance:
4. An NPR story from December 2007, entitled "Sam Cooke's Swan Song of Protest," says:
"In
1963, having already scored many hits in the secular pop marketplace,
Sam Cooke first heard Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Amid the civil
rights movement, Cooke was inspired to create his own protest song,
according to Peter Guralnick, Cooke's biographer.
As a black
singer from the South, racial segregation affected Cooke personally. In
October 1963, he was arrested and thrown in jail after refusing to be
turned away from a Shreveport, La., hotel which had initially accepted
his reservation. In December 1963, Cooke recorded "A Change Is Gonna
Come."
Though Cooke didn't live to see its success and reception,
"A Change Is Gonna Come" cemented his reputation as a soul-music legend.
The song was covered hundreds of times, including by Aretha Franklin.
"He
was one of the greatest male singers of all time," Franklin says. "You
put him in the category with Caruso and Pavarotti and these other great
names. Sam Cooke, bar none, was one of the greatest singers of all
time."
Songwriter and performer Sam Cooke was one of the most popular and influential black
singers to emerge in the late '50s, successfully to synthesize a blend of
gospel music and secular themes and provided the early foundation of soul music.
Cooke's pure, clear vocals were widely imitated, and his suave, sophisticated image set
the style of soul crooners for the next decade.
The Soul Stirrers: Sam Cooke, R.B. Robinson,
Paul Foster, S.R. Crain and J.J. Farley
Sam Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on January 22, 1931, but grew up in
Chicago, where his father Charles became a minister in the Church of Christ Holiness
Church. By age nine Sam, with his two sisters, formed a gospel trio the Singing
Children. As a teenager, he was a member of the nationally famous Highway Q.C.'s (so named
because their home base was the Highway Baptist Church) with his younger brother, L.C.
Cook. It was here that they sang with all the leading gospel groups of the day when they
passed through Chicago. It was also where J.W. Alexander, tenor and manager of the Pilgrim
Travelers, first saw the young Cooke. The Pilgrim Travelers were the second gospel group
recorded by Specialty and Alexander soon became the label's chief gospel scout. In 1949 he
brought the Soul Stirrers to Specialty.
In December 1950 Robert Harris the Soul Stirrers electrifying lead singer quit the
group. R.B. Robinson spoke up for the young Cooke and in 1951, at the age of nineteen, he
became lead vocalist of the Soul Stirrers, with whom he toured and recorded for six years.
The Soul Stirrers were one of the top acts on the all night gospel circuit. The group
recorded for Aladdin records in the 1940s and in 1948, they signed with Specialty Records.
Specialty, founded by Art Rupe in 1946, in it's first two
years issued only up-tempo blues recordings. In 1948, Rupe discovered the wide open field
of gospel and concentrated the next few years on gospel and boogie based blues to the
exclusion of most other forms of music.
In 1950, Cooke's first session with the group produced "Jesus Gave Me Water."
With his soaring vocal leads Cooke brought "style" to the gospel format. Though
"Jesus Gave Me Water" betrays the youth and experience of the twenty year old
Cooke it showed the potential Alexander saw in him.
Cooke soon became a gospel superstar. With the times changing soon Alexander was
pressuring Rupe to let Cooke issue records in the popular field. Constraints against
gospel performers performing secular material were strong and woven deep into the fabric
of the black community. However, the monetary and worldly rewards for singing gospel could
never equal those for singing to the masses. Cooke gave in and recorded
"Lovable" under the name Dale Cook. Cooke's voice was to unique not to be
recognized. Lovable sold 25,000 copies.
"Lovable" set off a backlash from his gospel fans and the Soul Stirrers were
booed whenever they made a personal appearance. Cooke was released by the Soul Stirrers
and replaced by Johnny Taylor. In the next five months there were no more releases by
"Dale Cook" or even Sam Cooke.
Blackwell and Cooke
Bumps Blackwell, Specialty's chief A&R man asked for his release. With royalties
due, Blackwell was offered Cooke's recording contract in lieu of cash. Blackwell accepted
and signed Cooke with Keen Records, a new label started by Bob
Keane.
Cooke sang his new songs with the same conviction he had brought to gospel music. In
1957 he released "You Send Me" which became a number #1 hit and sold 1.7 million
copies. "You Send Me" established Cooke as a commercial artist and as an
original pop stylist. In February, 1958 Specialty filed a lawsuit claiming that
Cooke had actually written and recorded "You Send Me" while still
under contract to Specialty, then recorded it for Keen. That being so the rights would
have belonged to Specialty. Cooke claimed the song had been written by his brother, who
was under no such restraints.
The musical pattern in "You Send Me" was the basis for most of Cooke's first
year with Keen. They were love songs, with pretty arrangements and sung with a rolling,
medium tempo.
In early 1959, Cooke released "Everyone Like To Cha Cha Cha" (#31)
which represented a change in dance style before he returned to the two step with
"Only Sixteen" (#28).
In 1959 Cooke left Keen over a royalty dispute. In1960 he signed with RCA and began
writing blues, gospel inflected songs. After he joined RCA Victor, Keen issued his second
biggest hit up to that time, the million selling "Wonderful World."
Cooke's first release on RCA barely made the middle of the pop charts. It did a little
better R&B, but not much. To add insult to injury, A Cooke written song "Nobody
Loves Me Like You" became a hit for the Flamingos later in the spring. Even without hits, Cooke continued to be a big hit on the one nighter and R&B
circuit. In March, he toured the Caribbean to sold out houses.
On September 6, Cooke and his wife became parents of a seven pound two once baby girl
they named Tracy. A week earlier RCA released "Chain Gang" since signing with
RCA. It peaked at number two on both the Pop and R&B charts and became his fourth gold
record.
In the next ten months, he released four records which included "Cupid."
They all should have been best sellers, but only sold in medium quantities., Why
they failed to sell is one of those quirks that drive record executives mad. It wasn't until "Twistin' the Night Away" in January, 1962 that Cooke got
back on track to stay. It was a number one R*B and Top Ten pop hit. Next came
"Having' a Party' which was a squel to "Twistin' the Night Away." Now Cooke
teamed up with Lou Rawls to sing "Bring It on Back To Me," an old gospel
song.
Lisa Boyer
Bertha Franklin
The crime scene
Hacienda Motel
With a live LP in the Top 30, Cooke was in L.A. partying when he met 22
year old Elisa Boyer at a club on December 11, 1964. They drove to South Central where
they registered at the Hacienda Motel as Mr.and Mrs. Sam Cooke. Later Boyer left the
room with most of Cooke's clothing. Cooke wearing one shoe and a jacket broke into the
motel's office where he thought Boyer was hiding. There he found Bertha Franklin the
motel's manager who shoot him three times with a .22. killing Cooke on December 11, 1964.
The manager of the motel, Bertha Franklin claimed Cooke had tried to rape a twenty one
year old woman Elisa Boyer and then turned on her. The coroner's office ruled the
death as justifiable homicide. Over thirty five years later there remain questions about
the circumstances of Cooke's death and there has been talk about reopening the
investigation.
J.W. Alexander, Lou Adler, Sam Cooke and Zelda Samuels
Two months after his death his song "Shake" peaked at #7 on the
pop charts. Cooke's songs have been covered by both rock and soul singers. "A Change
Is Gonna Come" was released in 1965 after his death and charted at #31. It
represented a return to Cooke's roots, placing him back in the spiritual setting from
which he had first emerged just nine years before.
Cooke was a ground breaking black music capitalist. He owned his own record
label (SAR/Derby), music
publishing company (Kags Music),
and management firm with offices in the Warner Brothers Building in Hollywood.. His
influences can be heard in the work of artists as varied as Michael Jackson and the
Heptones, but is most profoundly felt in the singing of Otis
Redding, Rod Stewart, and Al Green. The 1994 compilation Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story
1959-1964 suggests that his impact as a producer, though less widely recognized, was no
less important.
Gravestone at Forest Lawn Cemetery Glendale, California
Sam Cooke was a true superstar in his lifetime. After his death, his
legend became even larger. His influence can be heard in the precise phrasing of Smokey
Robinson, in the conscientious songwriting of Marvin Gaye, in the raw emotion of Lou Rawls
and in Aretha Franklin's controlled passion.
If Sam Cooke were alive to update “A
Change Is Gonna Come” for the current political scene, he might be
tempted to rename it “The More Things Change.”Credit Photograph by AP
Half
a century ago, on March 7, 1965, state troopers knocked down, gassed,
and beat a number of men and women who were participating in a peaceful
march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. That same day, radio
listeners around the country might have heard Sam Cooke singing a lyric
he’d written and recorded several months earlier, but which could have
been describing the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation on the Edmund Pettus
Bridge.
Then I go to my brother And I say, “Brother, help me please.” But he winds up knockin’ me Back down on my knees.
Like
the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Cooke’s brooding but bright civil-rights
anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” recently marked its fiftieth
anniversary. The song, which was released as the B-side of Cooke’s
posthumous hit single “Shake” just days after his funeral, in December
1964, entered the national pop and R&B charts during the first week
of 1965. It fell off the pop countdown, after peaking at No. 31, on
March 13th, and would slip from the R&B charts, where it climbed to
No. 9, on April 10.
These
anniversaries have passed without much commemoration—somewhat
surprisingly, given that Cooke’s recording remains as beloved and as
timely as ever. Then again, it may be that the song’s persistent
relevance explains the neglect. The serial shootings of unarmed black
men by law enforcement; the Justice Department report on police abuse
and corruption in Ferguson, Missouri; the gutting of a Voting Rights Act
provision that was one key consequence of the Selma marches—these and
other dispiriting headlines have perhaps rendered the confident optimism
of Cooke’s masterpiece difficult to sing along to without seeming
naïve. If Cooke were alive to update “A Change Is Gonna Come” for the
current political scene, he might be tempted to rename it “The More
Things Change.”
In
a story that has come to symbolize the ways in which American popular
music intersected with and helped sustain the civil-rights movement,
Cooke was motivated to write “A Change Is Gonna Come” by another sixties
anthem, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” When he first heard that
song, Peter Guralnick writes in 2005’s “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam
Cooke,” he “was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a
white boy had written it, that . . . he was almost ashamed not to have
written something like that himself.”
The
soul singer and former gospel star was further inspired when he heard
Peter, Paul and Mary singing Dylan’s song on the radio. As Daniel Wolff
explains in his 1995 biography of Cooke, “You Send Me: The Life and
Times of Sam Cooke,”the folk trio piqued Cooke’s commercial ambitions. Their recording proved that “a tune could address civil rights and go to No. 2 on the pop charts.” For Cooke, the result of these racial and artistic challenges was “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
As
origin stories go, this one is satisfyingly precise and frustratingly
incomplete. It pinpoints exactly what prodded Cooke to write a
civil-rights-themed protest song, but says nothing about the specific
protest song Cooke wound up writing, let alone the record he created (a
key distinction, which is too often elided).
For
one thing, “Change” delivers a message notably distinct from Dylan’s in
“Blowin’ in the Wind.” On the recording, Dylan is obviously concerned
about the troubles he’s addressing, but his flat delivery conveys none
of the urgency, hope, or confidence that are so paramount in Cooke’s
performance. Soon afterward, Dylan would write “Only a Pawn in Their
Game,” in response to the murder of Medgar Evers, and he would travel to
Greenwood, Mississippi, in support of voter registration, and perform
at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But the Dylan of
“Blowin’ in the Wind” muses over important issues from a third-person
distance that Cooke’s song (“I was born by the river…”) eschews from the
jump. Dylan poses philosophical musings and rhetorical questions amid
antiquated word choices (in the days of “Ban the Bomb,” he’s going on
about “cannonballs”), geological time frames (those washed-to-the-sea
mountains), and Old Testament allusions. “Blowin’ in the Wind” intimates
that the answers we crave are where they have always been and where,
tragically, they may well remain. “A Change Is Gonna Come” is
unequivocal.
The two recordings also sound as
unlike one another as two early-sixties records could: Cooke and Dylan
were wading up different streams of the American song for inspiration.
Dylan found much of his melody in the nineteenth-century black spiritual
“No More Auction Block for Me” (also known as “Many Thousands Gone,”
which was a source for another anthem of the era, “We Shall Overcome”),
while his voice and phrasing, and his austere and static strum, are
indebted to the Depression-era folk style of Woody Guthrie. By contrast,
the melody to “A Change Is Gonna Come,” with its long dynamic lines
that trek the peaks and valleys of arranger René Hall’s lush orchestral
landscape, shows Cooke working off of Tin Pan Alley standards, film
music, and show tunes.
“Change”
opens with a regal assemblage of strings, buffeted and borne heavenward
by kettledrum and French horn, all of which build theatrically and then
clear out quickly for Cooke’s entrance—you can imagine the singer
moving downstage into a spotlight, or a camera zooming to close-up. But
while the musical setting is grandiloquent, Cooke’s tale is
down-to-earth. He was born alongside a river that, like him, has never
stopped rolling. He’s been run off when trying to see a movie downtown
and beaten to his knees when asking for help. He’s had his moments of
fear and doubt, but through it all—big finish—he’s nurtured a faith, now
a conviction, that change is on the way. Cue tympani.
None of this sounds or feels like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It sounds like “Ol’ Man River.”
The
comparison isn’t arbitrary; we know that Cooke was familiar with the
song, which was written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1927
musical “Show Boat.” He included a version of it, alongside “Summertime”
and other Great American Songbook classics on his 1958 début album. “I
gets weary and sick of tryin’ / I’m tired of livin’ and scared of
dyin’,” he sings in his oddly smooth and swinging performance of the
Kern-Hammerstein tune. Six years later, he would transform those lines
in the second verse of “A Change Is Gonna Come”: “It’s been too hard
livin’, but I’m afraid to die.”
That
fairly direct allusion has been remarkably little noted, at least in
print. In his new book,“Who Should Sing ‘Ol’ Man River’?: The Lives of
an American Song,” Todd Decker notes only that Cooke’s song, like the
Kern-Hammerstein composition, mentions a river. More helpfully, he
observes that “the most prolific and engaged era for ‘Ol’ Man River’,”
the years in which it was most often included on albums and performed on
TV, stretched from the late nineteen-fifties well into the
nineteen-sixties. To cite only one example out of dozens, Ray Charles
released a version “Ol’ Man River” in 1963 that nicely anticipates the
slow pacing, heartfelt delivery, and big, old-school pop arrangement of
“A Change Is Gonna Come.” In 1964, Dylan’s wasn’t the only racially
themed protest song that was blowing in the wind.
“Ol’
Man River” is most closely associated with the stentorian
African-American singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson. He didn’t
début the song on stage, but Kern and Hammerstein wrote it with him in
mind, and he became identified with the song thanks to his several
recordings and innumerable live performances of it as well as his role
in the 1936 film version of the musical.
“Show
Boat,” like the Edna Ferber novel on which it’s based, was critical of
racial-miscegenation laws in the Jim Crow South, and “Ol’ Man River” was
intended to evoke minstrel songs of ante- and post-bellum America—while
subverting their sympathies. To that end, parts of Kern’s melody for
“Ol’ Man River” sound as if they might have been penned by the
nineteenth-century minstrel-song writer Stephen Foster. Kern and
Hammerstein also allude to—and pull the rug from under—an even older
anthem, Dan Emmett’s “Dixie.”
“Oh I
wish I was in the land of cotton,” that most notorious of blackface
minstrel songs declares. “Old times there are not forgotten.” In “Ol’
Man River,” Kern and Hammerstein force “Dixie” to switch sides, as it
were, borrowing the rhyme and, there at the end, a bit of the melody, to
allow Robeson—and, later, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke and so many
others—to make the opposite racial point: The white boss “don’t plant
taters and he don’t plant cotton / and them that plants them are soon
forgotten.”
Thanks to “Ol’ Man
River,” we can move from “Dixie,” the popular song most associated with
the Confederacy and Jim Crow, to “A Change Is Gonna Come,” one of the
songs most associated with civil rights, in just two steps.
One
way of reading this story is to note that racism isn’t the only thing
that lingers in America. Musical forms also persist. Sometimes, the old
tunes will be tools that we can use—recycled or repurposed, sampled for
the dance floor or shouted in a crowd, to aid in work that still needs
to be done. In “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke moves from bigotry
and bloodshed to hope and beauty in barely three minutes. But his song
was a long time coming, its genesis stretching a hundred and fifty years
and longer, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “No More Auction Block,” from
“Ol’ Man River” all the way back to “Dixie,” and through countless
other songs and people besides. Listen to the record today and you can
hear a story that’s ongoing. Cooke’s rough, sweet voice—blues-born and
church-bred, beat down but up again and marching—still rings.
More legendary singers hail from Chicago than from anywhere else
The familiar cliche is that Chicago's international reputation
rests primarily on three features: roaring '20s gangsters typified by Al Capone,
machine politics and Michael Jordan. But were there any justice to the
world, it really should be famous as the home of great singers; more
legendary singers have probably come from Chicago than from any other
city in the world.
As proof, Wikipedia
has a two-page compilation of 400 famous names under the category
"Singers from Chicago, Illinois," representing a wide range of styles
including pop, rock, jazz, soul and gospel (not counting a third,
separate Wikipedia page listing 68 Chicago rappers). Included are such
immortals as Mel Torme, Mahalia Jackson and Dinah Washington.
Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of the tragic death of one of
those great Chicago singers. In fact, if Sam Cooke (Wendell Phillips
High, class of '48) had not been killed at the age of 33, he might have
become the greatest. Considering vocal ability, style, writing talent
and social significance, perhaps only Ray Charles and Nat King Cole are
his equals on that Wikipedia list.
Cooke was born in 1931, the
throes of the Depression, in Clarksdale, Miss. Two years later, his
family made the Great Migration to Chicago and settled in Bronzeville.
His father, a Baptist minister, started a gospel group, and young Sam
quickly emerged as the featured performer. As a teenager, he was
recruited by the famous gospel group the Soul Stirrers. His beautiful
voice and captivating looks galvanized church congregations across the
South. Had he remained with the Soul Stirrers, he would have undoubtedly
become a gospel legend.
Against friends' advice, Sam sought greater fame in the
worlds of soul, rhythm and blues, and (horrors!) rock 'n' roll. He
abandoned the "sacred for the profane," aiming for the more lucrative
white audience, a decision that proved prescient when his first
crossover single, "You Send Me," sold more than a million copies in
1957. In 1960, he became one of the first black artists to sign with RCA
Records, which was looking for the "black Elvis." But the future of
rock 'n' roll was uncertain, so RCA hedged its bets and gave him bland
material to sing, which failed to showcase his considerable talents. Determined
to maintain control of his career, Cooke started his own publishing and
record companies, extremely rare for a black artist in those days.
Cooke also began writing many of his own songs, several of which became
rock standards, including "Another Saturday Night" ("and I ain't got
nobody"), "Wonderful World" ("Don't know much about history") and "Chain
Gang."
Cooke never lost touch with his black fan base and
continued appearing in black clubs across the country. But his real
breakthrough came in New York City at the Copacabana, the posh Manhattan
nightclub that had enforced segregation for years. Heralded by a
20-by-100-foot billboard in Times Square, Cooke became one of the
Copacabana's first black singers, joining the ranks of Ella Fitzgerald,
Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis Jr. Superstardom beckoned with his
memorable live album "Sam Cooke at the Copa."
In early 1964, Cassius Clay
(before he became Muhammad Ali) won the heavyweight title by upsetting
Sonny Liston, and immediately afterward, Clay invited Cooke ringside,
introducing him to reporters from all over the world as "the world's
greatest rock 'n' roll singer." Cooke was poised to bring his career —
and his social conscience — to a higher level.
That final year of
his life, Cooke wrote and recorded his magnum opus: the great civil
rights anthem, "A Change Is Gonna Come." He wrote the song during the
height of the civil rights movement, after being denied a motel room in
Louisiana and a subsequent arrest for disturbing the peace. The song's
haunting melody, powerful words and Cooke's incomparable delivery made
it an instant classic, as powerful today as it was 50 years ago.
The
song has been covered many times and is ranked No. 12 in Rolling Stone
magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Because of its cultural
significance, the Library of Congress
selected it for special preservation. According to Cooke biographer
Peter Guralnick, "Generation after generation has heard the promise of
it. It continues to be a song of enormous impact. We all feel in some
way or another that a change is gonna come, and he found that lyric."
Cooke
performed the song on national television on "The Tonight Show," but 10
days before the record was released, he was shot to death in a Los
Angeles motel.
At Cooke's Los Angeles homegoing, The Staples
Singers sang "Old Rugged Cross," Billy Preston played an organ hymn and
Cooke's boyhood friend Lou Rawls sang "Just a Closer Walk With Thee." In
a second service in Chicago, thousands lined up for blocks outside the
packed South Side funeral home in near-zero cold for his viewing.
Today,
as events from the 1950s and 1960s gradually recede from memory,
Cooke's legacy is unfamiliar to younger generations. Historical accounts
cannot completely convey the brilliance and power of his performances.
It's still there in some recordings and rare videos, but even those lack
context to transmit his excitement and electricity. That Sam Cooke died so young only adds a tragic dimension to his legend.
Recalling
the words of 19th-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier, "Of all sad
words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.'"
Dr.
Cory Franklin lives in Wilmette and is the author of "Chicago
Flashbulbs: A Quarter Century of News, Politics, Sports and Show
Business (1987-2012)."
Sam Cooke was that rare performer whose work seems fresh -- even timely -- half a century after its debut.
"A Change is Gonna Come"
With
hits like "You Send Me," Sam Cooke became one of the most popular
singers in the country. But by 1964, with the civil rights movement
spreading, the singer wanted to send a different message.
"It would just go all through your bones," said Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers.
"Were you surprised that song came from him then?" I asked Staples.
"You know when he came with that song we needed - black people needed
black people to do something for us and Sam Cooke was at the top," said
Staples.
Singing
star Sam Cooke stands next to a huge reproduction of his head on the
roof of a building at 43rd Street and Times Square, before it was raised
into place atop forty-foot reproduction of him, June 23, 1964. The head
alone is eight feet tall. It was painted by special artists of the
Artkraft Strauss Sign Company ASSOCIATED PRESS
Cooke who'd been turned away from a whites only hotel in Louisiana a year earlier wanted to write a song with the power of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind."
"If you observe what is going on and try to figure out how people are
thinking and determine the times of your day, I think you can always
write something that people will understand," Cooke once said.
"A Change is Gonna Come" quickly became a civil rights anthem. But
Cooke did not live to see it. He was shot to death in a Los Angeles
motel two weeks before its release.
Sam Cooke performs in concert at New York City's Copacabana Night Club in this undated photo. ASSOCIATED PRESS
"It's
like Sam's last song and everybody loved Sam because Sam was such a -
he'd give you the shirt of his back," said soul great Al Green, who
performed Cooke's song and made it his own at a 9/11 benefit in 2001.
"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on
this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to
America," said Obama during his victory speech.
Smokey Robinson called it "one of the world's great songs." "It's the kind of song as a songwriter you want to write because you know it's going to be around forever," said Robinson.
That's something that won't change. For more information on Sam Cooke and his music visit ABKCO
CBS News senior business and economics correspondent; Co-host, "CBS This Morning: Saturday"
THE MUSIC OF SAM COOKE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH SAM COOKE:
Sam Cooke Greatest Hits (Full Album) | The Best Of Sam Cooke Songs: SAM COOKE - "Bring It On Home To Me”-- (live at Harlem Square Club, 1963): Sam Cooke - “Cupid" - Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963: Record : LIVE AT THE HARLEM SQUARE CLUB,1963-Sam Cooke
Feel It / Chain Gang / Cupid / Medley (It's All Right - For Sentimetal Reasons) / Twistin' the Night Away / Somebody Have Mercy / Bring it on Home to Me / Nothing Can Change This Love / Having a Party
Sam Cooke-- "Live Twistin' the Night Away”- 1963: This is Sam Cooke singing "Twisting the Night Away" live on TV in 1963.
Sam Cooke - "You Send Me" (Live):
Sam Cooke "Good News” Sam Cooke—“Blowin' In The Wind” --Live at the Copa: Sam Cooke at the Copa: 1. Opening Introduction 2. The Best Things In Life Are Free 3. Bill Bailey 4. Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out 5. Frankie And Johnny 6. You Send Me 7. If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song) 8. When I Fall In Love 9. Twistin' The Night Away 10. Band Introductions 11. This Little Light Of Mine 12. Blowin' In The Wind 13. Tennessee Waltz
Sam Cooke—"Frankie & Johnny”-- Live At The Copa: Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson-"Cha Cha Cha”: Sam Cooke - "If I Had a Hammer" - Live at Copacabana (New York City) 1964:
Sam Cooke singing If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song) at the Copacabana, New York City, July 8, 1964. Written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, it was written in 1949 in support of the progressive movement. First recorded by The Weavers, a folk music quartet composed of Seeger, Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, and then by Peter, Paul and Mary.
Bass: Harper Cosby Drums: June Gardner Guitar: Bobby "Valentino" Womack, & Cliff White Percussion: Sticks Evans Conductor: Rene Hall Engineer: Bernard Keville Producer by Al Schmitt
Sam Cooke, "Feel It" & "Chain Gang”-- Live @The Harlem Square 1963:
Sam Cooke - Medley ("It's All Right”/"Sentimental Reasons”):
Samuel Cook[2] (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964),[2] known professionally as Sam Cooke, was an American singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur.
Influential as both a singer and composer,[3] he is commonly known as the King of Soul
for his distinctive vocals and importance within popular music. His
pioneering contributions to soul music contributed to the rise of Aretha Franklin, Bobby Womack, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Billy Preston, and popularized the likes of Otis Redding and James Brown.[4][5][6]AllMusic
biographer Bruce Eder wrote that Cooke was "the inventor of soul
music", and possessed "an incredible natural singing voice and a smooth,
effortless delivery that has never been surpassed".[7]
Cooke had 30 U.S. top 40 hits between 1957 and 1964, plus three more posthumously. Major hits like "You Send Me", "A Change Is Gonna Come", "Cupid", "Chain Gang", "Wonderful World", and "Twistin' the Night Away" are some of his most popular songs. Cooke was also among the first modern black
performers and composers to attend to the business side of his musical
career. He founded both a record label and a publishing company as an
extension of his careers as a singer and composer. He also took an
active part in the Civil Rights Movement.[8]
On December 11, 1964, at the age of 33, Cooke was shot and killed by Bertha Franklin, the manager of the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles, California. After an inquest, the courts ruled Cooke's death to be a justifiable homicide. Since that time, the circumstances of his death have been called into question by Cooke's family.
Cooke was born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931.[9] In 1957 he added an "e" at the end of his name; the reason for the change is disputed.[10] He was the fifth of eight children of the Rev. Charles Cook, a minister in the Church of Christ (Holiness), and his wife, Annie Mae. One of his younger brothers, L.C. (b. 1932), later became a member of the doo-wop band Johnny Keyes and the Magnificents.[11]
The family moved to Chicago in 1933.[12] Cooke attended Doolittle Elementary[13] and Wendell Phillips Academy High School[14] in Chicago, the same school that Nat "King" Cole
had attended a few years earlier. Sam Cooke began his career with his
siblings in a group called the Singing Children when he was six years
old.[15] He first became known as lead singer with the Highway QC's when he was a teenager, having joined the group at the age of 14.[16] During this time, Cooke befriended fellow gospel singer and neighbor Lou Rawls, who sang in a rival gospel group.[17] In 1950, Cooke replaced gospel tenor R. H. Harris as lead singer of the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, founded by Harris, who had signed with Specialty Records on behalf of the group.[18]
Their first recording under Cooke's leadership was the song "Jesus Gave
Me Water" in 1951. They also recorded the gospel songs "Peace in the Valley", "How Far Am I from Canaan?", "Jesus Paid the Debt" and "One More River", among many others, some of which he wrote.[1]
Cooke was often credited for bringing gospel music to the attention of a
younger crowd of listeners, mainly girls who would rush to the stage
when the Soul Stirrers hit the stage just to get a glimpse of Cooke.[19]
Crossover pop success
Cooke in Billboard magazine
His first pop/soul single was "Lovable" (1956), a remake of the gospel song "Wonderful". It was released under the alias "Dale Cook"[20]
in order not to alienate his gospel fan base; there was a considerable
stigma against gospel singers performing secular music. However, it
fooled no one[21]—Cooke's unique and distinctive vocals were easily recognized. Art Rupe,
head of Specialty Records, the label of the Soul Stirrers, gave his
blessing for Cooke to record secular music under his real name, but he
was unhappy about the type of music Cooke and producer Bumps Blackwell were making. Rupe expected Cooke's secular music to be similar to that of another Specialty Records artist, Little Richard. When Rupe walked in on a recording session and heard Cooke covering Gershwin, he was quite upset. After an argument between Rupe and Blackwell, Cooke and Blackwell left the label.[22]
Like most R&B artists of his time, Cooke focused on singles; in
all, he had 29 top 40 hits on the pop charts and more on the R&B
charts. He was a prolific songwriter and wrote most of the songs he
recorded. He also had a hand in overseeing some of the song
arrangements. In spite of releasing mostly singles, he released a
well-received blues-inflected LP in 1963, Night Beat, and his most critically acclaimed studio album, Ain't That Good News, which featured five singles, in 1964.[citation needed]
In 1963 Cooke gave Allen Klein
a five-year contract to manage Kags Music and SAR Records and made him
his manager. Klein negotiated a five-year deal (three years plus two
option years) with RCA in which a holding company, Tracey, Ltd., named
after Cooke's daughter, owned by Klein and managed by J. W. Alexander,
would produce and own Cooke's recordings. RCA would get exclusive
distribution rights in exchange for 6 percent royalty payments and
payments for the recording sessions. For tax reasons, Cooke would
receive preferred stock in Tracey instead of an initial cash advance of
$100,000. Cooke would receive cash advances of $100,000 for the next two
years, followed by an additional $75,000 for each of the two option
years if the deal went to term.[34]
Death
Cooke died at the age of 33 on December 11, 1964, at the Hacienda Motel, at 9137 South Figueroa Street, in Los Angeles, California.
Answering separate reports of a shooting and of a kidnapping at the
motel, police found Cooke's body, clad only in a sports jacket and shoes
but no shirt, pants or underwear. He had sustained a gunshot wound to
the chest, which was later determined to have pierced his heart.[35]
The motel's manager, Bertha Franklin, said she had shot Cooke in
self-defense after he broke into her office residence and attacked her.
Her account was immediately questioned and disputed by acquaintances.[36][37]
The official police record states that Franklin fatally shot Cooke, who had checked in earlier that evening.[38]
Franklin claimed that Cooke had broken into the manager's
office-apartment in a rage, wearing nothing but a shoe and a sports
coat, demanding to know the whereabouts of a woman who had accompanied
him to the hotel. Franklin said the woman was not in the office and that
she told Cooke this, but the enraged Cooke did not believe her and
violently grabbed her, demanding again to know the woman's whereabouts.
According to Franklin, she grappled with Cooke, the two of them fell to
the floor, and she then got up and ran to retrieve her gun. She said she
then fired at Cooke in self-defense because she feared for her life. Cooke was struck once in the torso.
According to Franklin, he exclaimed, "Lady, you shot me", before
mounting a last charge at her. She said she beat him over his head with a
broomstick before he finally fell, mortally wounded by the gunshot.[39]
The motel's owner, Evelyn Carr,[note 2]
claimed that she had been on the telephone with Franklin at the time of
the incident. Carr claimed to have overheard Cooke's intrusion and the
ensuing conflict and gunshot. She called the police to request that
officers go to the motel, telling them she believed a shooting had
occurred.[40]
A coroner's inquest
was convened to investigate the incident. The woman who had accompanied
Cooke to the motel was identified as Elisa Boyer, who had also called
the police that night shortly before Carr had. Boyer had called from a
telephone booth near the motel, telling them she had just escaped being
kidnapped.[41]
Boyer told the police that she had first met Cooke earlier that night
and had spent the evening in his company. She claimed that after they
left a local nightclub together, she had repeatedly requested that he
take her home, but he instead took her against her will to the Hacienda
Motel. She claimed that once in one of the motel's rooms, Cooke
physically forced her onto the bed, and that she was certain he was
going to rape her. According to Boyer, when Cooke stepped into the
bathroom for a moment, she quickly grabbed her clothes and ran from the
room. She claimed that in her haste, she had also scooped up most of
Cooke's clothing by mistake. She said she ran first to the manager's
office and knocked on the door seeking help. However, she said that the
manager took too long in responding, so, fearing Cooke would soon be
coming after her, she fled from the motel before the manager ever opened
the door. She said she then put her clothing back on, hid Cooke's
clothing, went to a telephone booth, and called police.[42]
Boyer's story is the only account of what happened between her and
Cooke that night; however, her story has long been called into question.
Inconsistencies between her version of events and details reported by
other witnesses, as well as circumstantial evidence,[note 3][43][44]
suggest that Boyer may have gone willingly to the motel with Cooke,
then slipped out of the room with his clothing in order to rob him,
rather than to escape an attempted rape.[45][38]
However, questions about Boyer's role were beyond the scope of the
inquest, the purpose of which was only to establish the circumstances of
Franklin's role in the shooting. Boyer's leaving the motel room with
almost all of Cooke's clothing, and the fact that tests showed Cooke was
inebriated at the time, provided a plausible explanation to the inquest
jurors for Cooke's bizarre behavior and state of dress. In addition,
because Carr's testimony corroborated Franklin's version of events, and because both Boyer and Franklin later passed lie detector tests,[46][47] the coroner's jury ultimately accepted Franklin's explanation and returned a verdict of justifiable homicide.[21] With that verdict, authorities officially closed the case on Cooke's death.[48]
Some of Cooke's family and supporters, however, have rejected Boyer's
version of events, as well as those given by Franklin and Carr. They
believe that there was a conspiracy to murder Cooke and that the murder
took place in some manner entirely different from the three official
accounts.[49][50][51][52][53][54][55] Singer Etta James
viewed Cooke's body before his funeral and questioned the accuracy of
the official version of events. She wrote that the injuries she observed
were well beyond the official account of Cooke having fought Franklin
alone. James wrote that Cooke was so badly beaten that his head was
nearly separated from his shoulders, his hands were broken and crushed,
and his nose mangled.[56] Some people speculated that Cooke's manager, Allen Klein, might have had a role in his death. Klein owned Tracey, Ltd., which ultimately owned all rights to Cooke's recordings.[57]
Aftermath
Grave of Sam Cooke, in the Garden of Honor, Forest Lawn Glendale
The first funeral service for Cooke was held on December 18, 1964, at
A. R. Leak Funeral Home in Chicago; 200,000 fans lined up for more than
four city blocks to view his body.[58][59] Afterward, his body was flown back to Los Angeles for a second service, at the Mount Sinai Baptist Church on December 19,[60] which included a much-heralded performance of "The Angels Keep Watching Over Me" by Ray Charles, who stood in for grief-stricken Bessie Griffin. Cooke was interred in the Garden of Honor, Lot 5728, Space 1, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.[58][61]
Two singles and an album were released in the month after his death. One of the singles, "Shake", reached the top ten of both the pop and R&B charts. "A Change Is Gonna Come", considered a classic of civil rights–eraprotest music.[62] It was a top 40 pop hit and a top ten R&B hit. The album, also titled Shake, reached the number one spot for R&B albums. After Cooke's death, his widow, Barbara, married Bobby Womack. Cooke's daughter, Linda, later married Womack's brother, Cecil.[25]
Bertha Franklin said she received numerous death threats after
shooting Cooke. She left her position at the Hacienda Motel and did not
publicly disclose where she had moved.[63]
After being cleared by the coroner's jury, she sued Cooke's estate,
citing physical injuries and mental anguish suffered as a result of
Cooke's attack. Her lawsuit sought US$200,000 in compensatory and
punitive damages.[63]
Barbara Womack countersued Franklin on behalf of the estate, seeking
$7,000 in damages to cover Cooke's funeral expenses. Elisa Boyer
provided testimony in support of Franklin in the case. In 1967, a jury
ruled in favor of Franklin on both counts, awarding her $30,000 in
damages.[64]
Personal life
Cooke was married twice.[58] His first marriage was to singer-dancer Dolores Elizabeth Milligan Cook,[65] who was killed in an auto accident in Fresno, California, in 1959.[66] Although he and Dolores were divorced,[67] Cooke paid for his ex-wife's funeral expenses.[58] Cooke and his second wife, Barbara,[68] had three children, including Linda Womack[69] and Vincent Cooke (1961 – 1963), who drowned in the family's swimming pool.[58][70] Cooke also fathered at least two other children out of wedlock.[71]
In 2008, Cooke was named the fourth "Greatest Singer of All Time" by Rolling Stone.[76]
In June 2011, the city of Chicago renamed a portion of East 36th
Street near Cottage Grove Avenue as the honorary "Sam Cooke Way" to
remember the singer near a corner where he hung out and sang as a
teenager.[77]
In 2013 Cooke was inducted into the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of
Fame in Cleveland, Ohio at Cleveland State Univ. The founder of the
Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame Museum LaMont Robinson said he was
the greatest singer ever to sing. The Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of
Fame Museum will be built in Cooke's hometown of Clarksdale, MS.
Some sources identify the motel owner's last name as "Card"
Examples
include the fact that no money was recovered, despite witness reports
that Cooke had had large sums of cash with him earlier in the evening,
and the fact that Boyer was soon afterward arrested for prostitution.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., eds. (2004). Africana: An A-to-Z Reference of Writers, Musicians, and Artists of the African American Experience. Running Press. p. 146. ISBN0-7624-2042-1.
DeCurtis, Anthony; Henke, James (1992). The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and their Music. Random House. p. 135. ISBN0-679-73728-6.
Bronson, Fred (2003). The
Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits: The Inside Story Behind Every Number
One Single on Billboard's Hot 100 from 1955 to the Present. Billboard Books. p. 30. ISBN0-8230-7677-6.
Dean, Maury (2003). Rock 'N' Roll Gold Rush: A Singles Un-cyclopedia. Algora Publishing. p. 176. ISBN0-87586-207-1.
Warner, Jay; Jones, Quincy (2006). On This Day in Black Music History. Hal Leonard Corporation. p. 10. ISBN0-634-09926-4.
Goodman, Fred (2015). Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 40. ISBN978-0-547-89686-1.
Burke, Solomon. "Interview conducted by Gary James". Classic Bands.
"I still think there was some kind of conspiracy ... I've always felt
there was some sort of conspiracy there. ... I listened to the reports
and I listened to the story of what happened and I can imagine Sam going
after his pants. I can imagine Sam going up to the counter and saying
'Hey, somebody just took my pants.' And he's standing there, seeing the
woman with his pants. I can imagine him saying "Give me my pants." But I
can't imagine him attacking her. He wasn't that type of person to
attack somebody. That wasn't his bag. He was a lover, OK. He wasn't a
fighter. He wasn't a boxer. You never heard of Sam Cooke beating up his
women."
Gordon, Ed (November 16, 2005). "Interview of Peter Guralnick". National Public Radio.
"I would say within the community there is not a single person that
believes that Sam Cooke died as he is said to have died: killed by a
motel owner at a cheap motel in Los Angeles called the Hacienda which he
had gone to with a prostitute named Elisa Boyer. I could have filled a
hundred pages of the book with an appendix on all the theories about his
death. Central tenet of every one of those theories is that this was a
case of another proud black man brought down by the white establishment
who simply didn't want to see him grow any bigger.
I looked into this very carefully. I had access to the private
investigators' report, which nobody had seen and which filled in a good
many more details. And no evidence has ever been adduced to prove any of
these theories."
Hildebrand, Lee. "Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick tackles another music legend: Sam Cooke". San Francisco Bay Guardian.
"'In the course of the two (hundred) or three hundred different
interviews with different people that I did for the book, there are two
(hundred) or three hundred different conspiracy theories,' he said.
'While they were all extremely interesting, and while every one of them
reflected a basic truth about prejudice in America in 1964 and the truth
of the prejudice that has continued into the present day, none of them
came accompanied by any evidence beyond that metaphorical truth.'"
Drozdowski, Ted (March 14–21, 2002). "Soul man, Sam Cooke's fulfilling late period". Boston Phoenix.
"It's hard to buy into conspiracy theories, though several swirl around
this incident that paint Cooke as the victim of a plot by white
supremacists to silence the country's most popular self-empowered black
man."
James, Etta; Ritz, David (2003). Rage To Survive: The Etta James Story. Da Capo Press. p. 151. ISBN0-306-81262-2.
Me" while still
under contract to Specialty, then recorded it for Keen. That being so the rights would
have belonged to Specialty. Cooke claimed the song had been written by his brother, who
was under no such restraints.
Cooke was a ground breaking black music capitalist. He owned his own record
label (SAR/Derby), music
publishing company (Kags Music),
and management firm with offices in the Warner Brothers Building in Hollywood.. His
influences can be heard in the work of artists as varied as Michael Jackson and the
Heptones, but is most profoundly felt in the singing of Otis
Redding, Rod Stewart, and Al Green. The 1994 compilation Sam Cooke's SAR Records Story
1959-1964 suggests that his impact as a producer, though less widely recognized, was no
less important.
